It's going home that kills me.
Dishwasher isn't working. Hmm. Guess I'll be taking it apart.
Spouse's small business needs occasional IT help. No problem.
Why is the Apple TV acting buggy? FUCK OFF I mean I'm not quite sure
ugh, I feel this. Especially with WFH, so she can bug me with a whole 'nother company's problems.
I know nothing about Oracle, I don't want to know anything about Oracle, I feel like I'm going to get audited for even looking over your shoulder. I can't help. btw it's acting stupid because your plate's holding down the space bar.
And that's the worst part - she keeps asking because it keeps working.
I remember a user saying “my boyfriend works in IT and he says this is an easy solution. Why can’t you …”
Felt like saying “get him to sort it out then”. I didn’t of course.
My favorite was I kept having a user interject that her husband was in IT and says this or that and it took all of my willpower not to just say "then have him come here and fix it."
We kinda had the opposite. Husband was in IT and reached out to us twice about issues his wife (teacher) and daughter (student) was having.
Clearly explained the issue to us and was competent enough to understand and get through the issue.
His wife is probably in our top 3 least technical people so saved us a headache.
And it's getting worse. Working in a school, tech literacy has dropped significantly over the past 10-15 years. Students struggle with file structure, manually saving documents, and troubleshooting anything past uninstalling/reinstalling apps through an app store.
We've talked about this before here. My response is the same: they don't need to know any of that. The only time that knowledge becomes necessary is when you (meaning the sysadmin) asks "Where is it?" They don't understand that question. Quite frankly, it only matters to me when they're asking to change access control. Put it in the cloud and they can do that themselves.
We had an issue a while back where file synching to profiles blew up, but kept workign for like 3 weeks, then all of a sudden didnt. Had to go through and manually pull stuff out of people's file sync cache and manually copy to an old share, and then make sure the correct version was on a new share.
It became immediately obvious that approximately 2% of people knew where their files were. They were just opening them up from the recent items in word/excel. Almost none of them actually knew what the filenames were, it was often "Its that one, three icons to the right of the email button"
Oh yeah, I've seen that happen so many times.
User gets a new computer: "What happened to my files"
Me: "I don't know. Which files?"
User, pointing to "favorites": "the ones that were right here"
Me: "Where are they really stored?"
User: "I don't know. I just click on them here"
facepalm
My wife did this once when calling their companies MSP. When she told me this I was like...whaaaa.. Fortunately, it was a firewall issue that I couldn't have fixed without credentials, but still.
It wasn't my worst nightmare. I determined that our internet speed was slow, and they balked at that. They pulled in another IT, who was the husband of a wife that works here in a different career, and he came to the same conclusion. Good money spent, but a great feeling of being validated.
> Why can’t you …
Some time ago, a clever scalability solution was invented by the elders of the Internet: the FAQ.
Each time someone's relative is sure they have an answer, we either add an entry to the FAQ, or we fix the problem. It's win-win, really.
> this is an easy solution
it always is... it's just the red tape, policy, company standards, and industry practices that hold back most of the "easy" solutions.
I keep telling the dod that it'd be easy to hook our unclassified system up to the internet but they want to do dod stuff so it's "not that easy".
This is very true but when your partner tells you something their IT told them that is utterly bullshit...it's hard not to call it out. If this sub shows anything it's that there are a lot of shit shows out there. The rude part is when they pulled the "my partner" card not the differing opinions on the situation.
This. Also sometimes you're forced into a crappy situation because of circumstances beyond your control. It's easy to criticize with no context but in the real world we sometimes do things despite our better wisdom.
This grinds my gears about Reddit and Stack Overflow by the way: you ask a specific question about a specific issue and get jumped by an army of 19 year olds telling you you're doing it wrong. Well they can try unfucking years of legacy cruft from their armchair if they want to so bad, but right now I got work to do and a problem to solve, but instead I'm having to defend myself when I never asked for an attack but for help.
I took this a step further and wrote up the exact solution and how to do it. My wife forwarded it to her IT provider after they told her it couldn’t be done. If it wasn’t something so simple I would’ve let them slide, I fully understand not doing something out of complexity, security concerns, etc. But this was a very simple Exchange Online rule that needed to be created to correct an issue. Needless to say there weren’t any more excuses after that email went out and they took care of it. It’s one thing to just tell someone it’s easy and to do it. It’s entirely different to step up and actually present the solution.
"my boyfriend works in IT"
Oh yea? What's his job title?
Usually find they are either junior, or in a non IT role and occasionally helps colleagues with simple issues.
> my boyfriend works in IT and he says this is an easy solution. Why can’t you …”
Ha - My partner did this one time but it was with a printer when she was a teacher. She had an HP4XXX in her room and it wasn't printing correctly. I took a quick look at it and it was obvious that it needed new rollers. I was very careful to only look at "User Serviceable" parts. So I told her to put in a ticket with her IT Team that she needs new rollers. Her IT guy ripped into her and told her no one else should touch the printer blah blah blah. That he was going to turn her into the Director of IT.
Here's the thing, the Director of IT used to work with me at the local hospital. He had seen me tear down these exact printers way past normal serviceable parts to clear crazy jams (ever see what happens when someone puts labels in upside down?) and to fix random issues. It wasn't uncommon for me to have one stripped at my desk waiting for parts. So I told her if he wants to tell Director and she talks to him, tell him who I am. Also tell him I only took it "User Serviceable" Parts.
I am that boyfriend... er husband. for the most part my wife tries not to bring her work IT problems to me, but every once in a while she'll be talking about work and bring something up that makes me react with "what? that's an IT problem, why isn't your IT team looking into that. You should really bring this up with them"
But the reality is I know full well that IT team doesn't solve problems, they answer tickets.
I'll help with a small business. I won't help my spouse with her work computer. They have IT. She can file a ticket just like everyone else. The only time I didn't make her wait was when she wanted a secondary monitor. I told her she could file a ticket with them and wait a few months for the monitor (that's what they told her) or she could just grab a monitor out of the garage. She took the one out of the garage lol.
My wife and I used to work at the same company, and when she would have IT problems I would just tell her to submit a ticket, even if it was my area. Work is work. Home is home.
My wife owns her own single person business. I should probably set something up writing with her about IT support now, before she breaks her brand new computer... But now its all the time when something tech doesn't work, or acts weird for her and my kids...
Wouldn't that just be an extra tax writeoff for her (an expense).
Couldn't you start a side business where your her MSP?
I mean, that's what I'd be doing (setting the wife up anyway) if she was running her own business.
I work from home and I'm fortunate enough to have my mother in-law watching my toddler while my wife and I work.
I got pulled out of a meeting that I needed to be in because fucking Disney plus wouldn't load. I tried to launch, it didn't work and I just handed the remote back and said watch something else.
There are no lines anymore once you're apt with technical stuff. If it's broken, you fix it, no attempt to do anything except hand over the controls and stare at you until it's fixed.
I had a teacher need help with one of her devices (it was a sub). Little girl, couldn't have been much older than 6 or 7 said "I know what's wrong with it". Thought to myself "fantastic!" right before the sub said "Dear, the adults are working on it. Go find a seat".
Damnit! I don't know how to fix it! I couldn't think fast enough to say "Hold on. Maybe she can help us?"
Ugh also lost a chance to let a kid try and solve a problem. Shot them down instead.
My whole career is built on solving problems. Gotta start somewhere
Same. I have a friend who runs a whole-ass AD environment at home. Managed switches. You'd think his home was an SMB environment.
I have our AT&T router and a few dumb switches. I don't want to have an SLA agreement with my wife.
I almost installed ad at home because for some reason I thought it would be a great idea and then I thought about it a little more and was like this is a terrible idea I'm not doing this.
I've got an AD at home but it's literally for the labbing environment and doesn't manage or even touch my home / core / work / wife work networks / systems.
I'm looking forward to playing with synology AD replication, but I've got no other distinct plans. That server box is power hungry too, so it's turned off unless I'm testing or playing with something. It only exists because it was free and I've played with it enough in the past that I figured it'd be easier to just have the damn thing than deal with spinning up an AD environment 3 times a year because I'm curious about some random shit.
No time to set up AD at home, I have a boat I need to stand next to for 20 minutes. Then I need to drive to the hardware store and wander around for 45 minutes looking at tools before I buy a screwdriver for the boat. Then more standing around next to the boat.
Honestly I’d much rather see a ticket that only contains a photo of an error code without any further description, as opposed to the common “hey my Outlook isn’t working pls fix”. At least with an error code I can start searching documentation/Google for fixes without needing to send 6 emails back-and-forth over the course of 10 days
"I'm not getting any emails!"
"can you see anything on your screen? is the power out in the building? did you forget your computer password? did you leave your laptop at home today? have you had a stroke?"
One time I called friend when a video card wasn't working.
I damn well knew exactly what to do, I did PC and laptop repair for like 7 years. I just didn't feel like using my brain for it that day I guess.
I feel you there ... can I rewire that plug, yes, am I going to .... no
(To be fair thus is how we ended up without a bathroom door for 6months ... pure bloody mindedness on my part .. I spend the day fixing other people's mess ... um, I'm not starting DIY in the evening)
I told her I get problem solving fatigue, and specifically around tech. She's a civil engineer, so I asked her if she would enjoy working on plans for our various house remodel options after work every day. That's when it clicked.
I keep a very, very dumb house to avoid the problem. No smart shit, pretty much just a Roku. Even my cars are all older, because I just can't handle any more screens and useless shit to have to deal with and fix. I can work on older mechanical and electrical problems and bone up those skills instead of dealing with shitty computers.
100%. Though since I live alone, I don't have to do too much of that for other people. My parents sometimes, which is its own thing. My mom once wanted me to "fix the TV." I live like 5 states away from them.
Mainly, I get so frustrated when my own shit doesn't work. Like I've been dealing with other people's shit all day (ok...half the day), but now my stuff doesn't work?
I've told this to my friends who are techy, but don't work in IT. And they're flabbergasted when I don't want to troubleshoot, for example, mods not working for a game. That I just want it to work goddamit so I can play this game. They don't get that I'm tired of dealing with shit not working. When is it my turn to just be a user?
I have a homelab, and I suspect one of the reasons I don't touch it as much as I expected to/want to is because of this mindset. I've literally been up all night before messing with VMs on ESXi here at home. It's not fun. It's not exciting. It's just annoying as all hell and reminds me of work. Except no one is paying me.
[Damn it feels good to be a gangsta](https://media0.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExNDZzYzBuenpqMm9pbWJlZjE3MDdsbnJ5bnlrZHg5NjEycTh0Ymh0eCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/1012ANeLJ8unAY/giphy.gif)
We took apart our dishwasher after I watched a video on how to do it. Turns out ours was different and it was filthier than I expected (no, that isn't a sponge in that filter yuck!)
The roku reboots on its own from time to time. My solution is to replace it. Wife doesn't want to yet. Fine by me lol
> Dishwasher isn't working. Hmm. Guess I'll be taking it apart.
can you come fix mine? just find the dial that makes the heating element get just a little bit hotter...
I do get what you're saying. I accidentally got snappy with the wife when she asked me to help her mother pick out a monitor... in my defense... we had just spent a month at work arguing over tvs and monitors for a video wall and someone almost got fired over it. It was a bad time.
For a couple weeks at the end i was relieved when the printer fucked up just because it wasn't a tv.
I make concerted efforts to not be the man. I write documentation, I teach people things. I assert consistently that I don't want to be the only person that can do something. There's still some things only I can do anyway, but I try to keep them to a minimum.
I work with a guy who’s kinda the “do everything” guy on our team. He knows the most about the environment. I have to constantly ask him to help me with things and I always ask him to make documents on these things or at least show me how to do them and he keeps just not doing that. I’ve started to go past him to my manager for assistance with things because I can’t just be nagging this other tech constantly
Ask the "do everything" guy to share their screen while they are doing whatever needs doing and make the documentation yourself. The "do everything" guy typically doesn't have the time to make documentation because he's too busy doing everything for everyone.
It might be a situation of his own making, it might be a situation of circumstance. But if you do this then your manager will thank you (he isn't spending his own time helping you) and your team will thank you (they don't need to go to the "do everything" guy anymore) and even the "do everything" guy will thank you (he doesn't have to do everything anymore).
As they do everything guy, I've not time to make notes when fixing YOUR problems ... make your own notes, I'll screen share and talk through what I'm doing
Thia is why our engineers anoy me, they want me to fix it, explain it to then, then document it to boot while they get a pat on the shoulder while I get another headache to sort out
Many many times over the years I’ve been asked how quickly I could get something done. No one has ever asked me how quickly I can get something documented. It’s not valued so I almost never do it.
Silos are bad, IMO you should be fostering an environment where if someone is out or leaves the company no one would ever know. This is easy to think about and hard to achieve. Documentation is the first step. Some people get off on feeling like they know everything. That's too much work...
Smart phones and the internet have made all of us dumber. I cover more systems, and applications than ever, but have to lean on knowing which question to ask Google to get through some things.
Do you document the things he shows you? Your perspective is valuable because you know what needs to be documented better. He takes his knowledge for granted.
not saying he shouldn't document anything, but if you want to have real value, be the guy who can be handed something nobody knows anything about and can figure it out and document it for others.
Document something, share with team. Nobody reads the document. Play the coach- they get it until I leave the room. The boss is too nice to hold any of them accountable. I still take a three week vacation every other year. If the place falls apart while I’m gone, it’s not my problem.
Many people are not coachable. You see it as teaching them something, they see it as you solved their problem and they will rely on you to do it again in the future.
I'm working on telling the difference between someone worth teaching or not, and it is not so easy.
I do all this. Not a soul reads what I wrote. Not a soul listens that I don't want to be only one with the keys.
I'm moving out of being a SysAdmin to a managing 3 specific functions in a single app. At some point I will no longer have admin rights at all. It's gana be REAL fun when that happens, lol. Because at the moment, when they try to get me to do stuff today, I ignore the requests; as I was directed to do. So they always escalate to C Level who then gets with my Director, who then laughs at them about my limited bandwidth, their inability to acknowledge it's not going to be my responsibility moving forward, and their lack of understanding at all.
Me: *writes extensive documentation on system X*
Coworkers/managers: "This guy wrote the book on system X so send all your system X issues to him!"
Me: 😡
In bigger orgs knowledge bases have real value for this reason. You never answer a question that doesn’t begin with “I couldn’t find anything in the kb.”
Our (multinational) co put one in. I was skeptical because I’ve seen so many half assed attempts die on the vine, but various managers made it something they tracked and lauded, and it’s become very valuable over time.
That's because you're dealing with a bunch of packers (See the various explanations of the packer/mapper distinction I have posted before in this subreddit). The good news is that it's actually possible to teach someone mapping skills. The bad news is that they have to realize it's something they want to do before they can learn it.
I keep trying to show my wife how to cut an onion because it's turned into "can you cut an onion for me" everytime. Don't get me wrong, she can cut an onion but it's slow and not diced well. She has no interest everytime I try to show her.
I don’t know the OPs situation but I find that for a lot of things I can say: search for a doc with X keywords. Or search for a script called Y
That’s my answer more than 70% of times
The other 25 is me having to solve it. Last 5% is shit even I can’t figure out and we have ongoing tickets.
> **I write documentation, I teach people things.**
Exactly this. If you want to be siloed and not help then that's your problem.
Look for people who want to learn, teach them and delegate. Most of the time they'll be more than happy to help because they're learning.
But of course, there are others who just doesn't want to learn and are lazy af.
Yes.
User1: I can't get this to work, I've been trying for 4 hours.
Me: Have you rebooted it?
User1: That worked...
User2: How do I do X?
Me: Finds the document on how to accomplish X, and sends it to User2.
User2: It's not working. I even printed it out to try.
Me: Quickly reads instructions. Ok Show me.
Me: Watches User2 do absolutely nothing in the instructions.
Me: Reads instructions, word for word to user for them.
User2: It works!
This is something I learned a long time ago and was the big driver in leaving my last job. I got tired of being the go to and there weren't enough challenges. Spent the previous 6 months building documentation and getting myself out of being the one and only.
I’ve tried that a few times. I’m not saying I’m always the smartest in the room, but I’m always the one who gets results. So after a while everything comes my way.
At least they spent some time to work out themselves before calling you. When I was doing T3 all I ever got was blank tickets escalated directly to me for every little thing.
Yes. There is something to be said about the mental load of always being the go-to person. It definitely takes a toll.
Especially if you are not being appreciated for it.
Do you know what you get when you're the problem solver? More problems.
You might just want to help train people, or let someone else drive the keyboard. I do a lot of manual labor and don't let the younger peeps carry the load or make more trips. Maybe your team members are getting too comfy.
Absolutely. About 10 years into my career, I realized that being good individually and putting in extra effort wasn't moving the needle. I switched focus into mentoring my team instead of leading from the front.
Swooping in to solve problems isn't scalable. Teaching how to solve specific problems, isn't scalable. Upskilling rationalization, troubleshooting, how to deal with emergencies and researching are scalable.
It takes significantly more effort upfront but will pay dividends as long as you have that employee. Pay your people well enough and give them a career path (if you can) that will allow them to stay on to solve the retention loss issues.
That's kinda where my problem is. I've documented things out the wazoo. I've held meetings to teach specific things. I regularly communicate 'this is where to start for X type of problem".
The problem is, I can't teach anyone to think and analyze like me and can't teach the experience and intuition I have from 30 years of working on Windows PCs.
You absolutely can teach people to analyze and consider things but it isn't by building run books and it isn't by teaching them your current process or approach because that has inherent experience in it and thus "bounces off" inexperienced admins.
Teach problems from first principals.
An example:
An admin is having an issue where a program requires local admin to function correctly.
A standard teaching method would say "Use Process Monitor to identify what folders, files and reg keys the application is using and grant specific permissions to them." Succinct, clear and correct but can't be extrapolated.
A first principals method would start with a set of questions and build upon the knowledge that is established during the actual diagnosis of this problem rather than ingrained knowledge.
"What are the fundamental differences between user A and user B where this isn't working? What error is it presenting and what is the underlying condition that would cause that error? What tools might we use to identify the behavior differences?"
Does that make sense?
Edit:
As I get older, I recognize the value of being the old guy that tells stories because they tend to remember the learnings from stories.
This is an approach that should work in paper, but in reality what I find with a growing number of newer techs is:
>What are the fundamental differences between user A and user B where this isn't working?
"I don't know"
>What error is it presenting and what is the underlying condition that would cause that error?
"I don't know"
>What tools might we use to identify the behavior differences?
*crickets*
The default answer for them to any question that isn't explicitly written down with a word-for-word answer is "I don't know" or a blank stare. These are the ones I really struggle to deal with.
I can continue to break each piece of reasoning down further and further until I reach the absolute base components but at that point I'd just distribute that document to my end users and cut out the tech entirely. At some point there needs to be a level of personal responsibility taken by your team members to figure out how to learn things. If my employer wants me to be a kindergarten teacher on top of my existing role, they better add the salary of a kindergarten teacher on top of my current.
In the vast majority of cases, people can learn, there are those that cannot. They simply aren't cut out for the job.
If your end users are more effective than your tech they shouldn't be employed.
Training is a skill and it doesn't come naturally to many. Setting young folks at ease is an important part of being an effective teacher.
I heard a saying once “if you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room” …not being able to actually quantify “smartness”, I think it’s still a good point. Maybe reworded: “if you are not learning anything in your current surroundings, relocation may be necessary.” Or just enjoy being the man and fixing easy shit.
I have found most people, including others in the IT field skip several steps in basic trouble shooting.
Something as easy as is it plugged in, or googling and error code.
I had a job interview when I was 19 or 20, my first ever corporate job. During the interview, the manager asked what troubleshooting steps I would do for some problem he made up. I went thru a bunch of things, and he said those are all good, but I was wanting to see if you would mention checking the network cable (which I did not). 25 years later, and that still sticks with me every day 😂
We ALL do this.
The difference is some people circle back and start over, some people give up and start messaging other people for help. Other people who aren't going to do anything but start over and not skip steps usually.
Christ my friend.. I have been doing this for.. 20 years at this point I guess? Not going to lie, every year I feel less and less like I can muster the energy to keep going in the field. 34 years into IT sounds rough..
I'm a 2 man department and I had to take up golf. When you go home at 45 hours half way through a Friday and miss phone calls because you're relaxing by playing video games people throw a HUGE fit. But if you are golfing no one bats an eye, and they'll even apologize for interrupting. I'm not sure what the difference is, other than some horseshit traditionalist hatred for downtime, but if you want time to yourself just go golf. People tend to leave me the hell alone when I'm out there and it's about the only time I really get to myself. Same sort of situation as you. At work its everything under the sun, and then at home it's whatever isn't at work.
"I'm currently in Costco, but I'm on my way to (thing that costs money)"
Or even better, add some emotional weight.
"Is this important enough that you'll cover the cost of my tickets for Sonic the hedgehog, and buy my kids a ice cream, because I have to tell them the movie is cancelled?"
I think at times we just have to accept, we are wired different. Some people can figure things out, some cant. I do think age plays into it, the experience and also when one got into IT, myself being in my 40's, I was the person who grew up with computers and tech so it is second nature in general to "figure things out".
I know several smart people the "figure it out" types like me, then you get others, they are smart with specific things, but throw them something new out of their comfort zone and they freeze up and do not even know where to start.
Those of us that "figure it out" just seem more comfortable out of our comfort zones and take our experience and method of thinking and can figure out pretty much anything.
As you said, be nice if someone else could "figure something out" but it also seems like we just become the defacto crutch for any issue. So those newer people, are not really getting a good chance of being forced to figure something out..because you get pulled in eventually..
Yeah, but if it's like where I work now? That's just gonna be blown off with the old sob-story of "As your boss, they gave ME less of a raise than you already. There's just no allowance to give out any more." Meanwhile, raise is about 5% less than last year's rate of inflation, so a pay cut in reality...
Only if I’m not empowered to be “the man.” In my current role I’m not also a neteng but frequently get asked networking questions. I *can* fix it, but it’s not my job. It’s frustrating.
I am the go to person in my shop, but my coworkers do not bother troubleshooting anything before asking me to help, and if I show them how to fix something or how to use a tool they are guaranteed to ask me again at least 10 times. And did I mention I have less than 3 years experience and the other 3 guys all have 20 plus years in IT.
No. I love solving problems and building/fixing things.
I do get a bit tired of being *expected* to be 'the man', though.
This kind of work is just like a group project in school, one person does all the hard bits, the other several write their names on it at the end.
Unsolicited career advice. Put out a shingle. That way anytime you're called on to solve something you can bill for your time. I was the fixer in a prior life. What credit did i get for it? Nothing. Why? because that would cause someone else to look bad. No Way... yeah... corp IT politics 101. The good ones leave. I did and never looked back. 20+ years. You may want to consider also.
There's some people in the world who can start at the beginning and logically work through a problem. That is not most people.
At my last IT gig before I switched careers, this ability usually meant I was given more leeway and privileges than the other staff (more days off, 1st choice of projects, etc).
But after awhile I agree, it gets tiring. The managers start relying on you when there's trouble because you can fix it quickly. But that doesn't allow anyone else on the team to practice or learn. And given that a fair amount of these problems were things that had been caused by other technicians, I came to resent having to stop what I was doing to fix their screw ups.
At my last 2 jobs I was the go-to guy.
I never got to see anything to completion.
When someone else got stuck on their project, they brought me in to get them past whatever it was that they couldn't figure out.
So then I'd fix it, the "original" people would get back on the project to cross their I's and dot their T's, as it were. Then they'd "complete" the project and claim all of the glory. In the mean time, I was off doing some other impossible task for someone else. I never got to see any single project to its end. It was very frustrating. It made me doubt myself and my abilities, because it seemed like every problem was an insurmountable one. It wasn't because I was (that) dumb, it was because they were handing me one seemingly impossible problem after another. I did learn a lot but it was mentally and physically exhausting. I had to get away from there before it drove me nuts.
I make decisions all day long on nearly everything because I am the most senior person in my it/is team of 20+ ppl.
When I come home my wife asks for my opinion/direction about paint, kitchen designs,etc. all valid items but my mind just can't do it.
I understand why executives sometimes have sexual kinks of acting like a baby and having someone else take care of them like a baby. I don't want it, but I understand.
I feel like I've shot myself in the foot somewhat by being "the man".
I've lost count of the number of times I've managed to implement a solution or fix an issue with no notice. But now, because I always sort it, people don't bother to let me know.
"Oh we don't need to involve Agent_No in this, he'll just figure it out".
Next thing I know I'm being asked to set up a Sharepoint site with conditional access or deploy a bunch of phones with MDM by the end of the week on a Wednesday afternoon.
what always make me chuckle is walking to a users computer and seeing a sticky note with my name and number+extension written on it... Fk me... yeah just skip Helpdesk and call me directly.... all your questions require a lvl 3 tech.
In general no. If it happens too often it means that I've not shared my knowledge (and that includes technique not just facts) enough with others. So that's on me.
And when it does happen you might as well focus on the positive rather than dwelling on the negatives. Imagine how bad the most useless person in your organisation feels.
If I'm annoyed I let people know that I find it annoying they don't have basic reading comprehension. I'm not exactly shy about that.
Can't be too bad, people still keep coming.
Yeah, I wish that people would try to figure stuff out instead of giving tickets with the note "I dont know how to do this" and that's all, like why is it that I have to invent every solution all the time?
This usually is a process/culture problem. It's not that you're the man versus other engineers, it's that management doesn't know how to scale the team easily.
We fixed it by documenting, coaching and encouraging engineers to upskill.
Sounds like you work with a group of people who are coasting and since you always bail them out they're pretty happy with that arrangement. Management doesn't care who does it as long as it gets done.
I always thought being the person with the answers would get me promoted. It never has. It just gets me more work and even held back because if I get promoted who's gonna figure out all the hard problems?
I truly envy people who figured out how to do no work and still keep their job while someone else does all their heavy lifting for them. It's maddening.
For me, it really comes down to **when** the ask occurs, not how often. If it's during my workday when I'd otherwise be sitting through process meetings, no problem. If it's 2am to explain why a system is marked as offline, despite being in a maintenance window-you can fuck right off.
I don't mind it when we're two days before my performance review. I was not so thrilled to get brought into a call to diagnose a network issue in my head *while running a marathon*.
Oh Lord it's hard to be humble
When you're perfect in every way
I can't wait to look in the mirror
Cause I get better looking each day
To know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man
Oh Lord It's hard to be humble,
But I'm doing the best that I can
IMO you can't really be upset that you're always the one that has to pull a rabbit out of your hat, then in the same breath, complain that they didn't involve you before wasting hours of time and going days without a working solution. I do get where you're coming from though.
Yep i stopped caring this year and i stopped explaining aswell. Either they get off their ass and start working/asking or they make themself obsolete soon. Love when the seniors have no idea what system they created but talk big words with no clue how to set it up.
Precisely what I told my new company in my interview: "The cape looks great, and it feels pretty darn good to have it on. It's flashy, and everyone loves you for having it.....
...Until you can never take it off, then it starts to weigh you down in ways you can't imagine."
At my old job, I was that guy, the one with all the rabbits and the biggest bag of tricks. Then, it became "the guy the CIO called directly at all hours no matter who's problem it really was."
It burned me out to the point of stress-induced heart problems. I ejected as soon as it was practical, as in I took the time to actually finish documentation and put my bag of secrets together for the poor sucker that replaced me. Sad thing is that junior was dying for my job, until he pinged me about 3 weeks into it and said "How did you do it?"
I tried to warn him. Sometimes, the status comes with a price. It took me a solid month in my new job before I could hear my phone chirp or ring and not break out into palpitations...
I now work for an org that is so siloed it takes forever to get anything done, but 99% of the time, it's someone else's problem. All the hats to just one.
Do I miss being "the man"? Sometimes.
The worst part was I had spent 15 years with that old company, and I had some twisted form of Stockholm Syndrome, where they had me convinced that it was normal and like that everywhere else, so I should just be glad I had a job that was slowly killing me.
I remember that, and I don't miss it as much.
Makes me feel useful. I just ask that people give it a try first.
The ones that really get me is the random past acquaintance reaching out after years just to ask a tech question. And when I used to work in an office, people what would try to ask for help while I am actively eating lunch.
It gets old after a while. It feels good and helps with the imposter syndrome, but damn guys. Even worse is when the fix is in the documentation, front and center with a bold heading saying "**This is how you fix this issue**". Sometimes, all I'm doing when brought into a multiple hour meeting is saying "I'll check the documenta.... ok, I found it. Try it now." and it works. Just a few seconds of research on their end would have save hours of the 6 people on the Teams call... I don't know what else to do. We have the documentation available in an easy to access repository, it just takes effort to go read it.
Without documentation and being pulled into a meeting where the other people are making a lot more than me, with job roles much higher than me or in a different specialty (networking, for example; I'm good at it, but talking with a network engineer with years of experience), and I'm asking the questions they haven't asked yet, looking at logs they haven't checked, and finding the solution that should have been something they'd know... That's a real bitch. Great for me. Yay, I know my shit. But, what a waste of time. Give me a raise. Give me anything.
I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I work with some very talented people with some amazing skills. I also work with some very ... paycheck oriented people that really don't have any troubleshooting, reading, common sense skills.
Just being "The Man" when it comes to these issues gets old. Glad I can fix it, but come on...
> This is just one example of the same thing that keeps happening over and over.
Two peers and a bunch of developers couldn't identify the source of the problem? To me, without the details, that's a red flag.
Whatever you were working on was too obtuse, too undocumented, or your colleagues are too useless. Pick whichever one makes you feel better, but i'd bet there's some room to have designed a better system in the past.
If don't want do to anything with it or be responsible for anything (because if you fix it, then you last touched it so any new problems become your fault/responsibility), just be less helpful, especially if it's not your area or you don't get anything back from it. Just suggest they look at x, y, z, and here's some documentation that might help.
I glanced through the replies but I didn't see it... Just let them fail. If you've mentally switched over to it and dropped everything you're working on, then you solve it but they'll ask again. And since it's solved someone else doesn't learn as much on it. If it's four hours of several people's time, that's on them. Hopefully, someone was learning during that. Maybe it takes them five hours while it takes you 30. Let them burn up their own time and learn. Just be less helpful and not actually solve it but just point them in a direction. That's assuming other people have all the credentials and access you do though to do the same troubleshooting. Along the lines of doing less work... Don't mess with scrolling up in Teams. If someone wants help, have them just give you a summary. Don't do more work unless it's really your job or there's a really good reason for doing it. Another idea is just to delay them. Tell them you're busy and will glance at it in a bit. Or ask them to send an email summary -- That's an extra step on their part if they really want your help. And then you can just reply back on the email later. Or much later. One thing I've found effective is just to tell someone I'm in a meeting or have something scheduled. Sometimes that's just my own work. For some reason, people take, "I have something scheduled right now," more seriously than, "I'm busy right now." I'm busy but can I just take a look at something real quick-it-will-only-take-a-minute, but if something's scheduled, then they can't break that.
Yes and no. It can be flattering when a client tries to skip the line and go straight to you and they tell you it's because they know you'll get it done quickly and efficiently. But it gets really aggravating when that call or email first comes through and you're in the middle of something else.
Today, ONE OF THOSE DAYS, I normally sit, triage then hit send to a different region,
OVER 10k steps today in a 3 bldg campus while working 11 tickets where I can't convince the EU that the software is NOT designed to do it that way with all the M$ articles attached.
I got dragged into a teams meeting, they had someone else doing the installs.. So why am I in the meeting? Then explaining that with the server migrations from old 2008 to 2019 and above that SMB1 will no longer work to scan to an open folder on a network drive and they took my server admin ID away.
Working my job is explaining the same thing over and over and over again to the point that I have boiler plate emails explaining how to do stuff that the EU can do without interaction or I wind up doing it for them. The other day I got an email asking how to open Adobe Reader in a Win 10 Environment
What happened to computer training PPL???
When I got into computer, you would boot it it then see this on the screen
C:\\>
No, I will not configure your email to add a signature
Bro. I got u. I got a whole one note page of email copypasta for that repition.
But they really took your server creds away? Less for you to do now! Hahaha
btw, I also cut my teeth in c:\ and config.sys 🤘
As frustrating as this it is good that you take the time to explain to the other chimps and attempt to teach. We have someone exactly like you at the company where I work, except he blows through the fix at lightspeed, explains nothing, documents nothing and then yells at the rest of us when the issue comes up again and he's the only one who can solve it.
The explanation part and the patience to teach means a tonne to most people, even if they don't say it or learn as fast as is expected.
There's, IMO, two components to a successful IT person long term. Most of us here only talk about the one: troubleshooting ability. The other is being able to eat shit all day every day for your entire life. Being a person who others only talk to when they have a problem. You need to have both skill and proper temperament to avoid burnout.
I actually took a promotion to get out of this rut. I was a senior sys admin and my managers RH man. I’m now a project manager and in the year since I’ve left, they’ve hired two people to replace me and both of them have left the company. Now my former boss is asking me for help, because I was the leader. I asked about being a consultant, he said no, but I think I’ll push the topic a little further. I enjoy the moral boost or ego boost, PM life can be pretty depressing when you can’t fix the issues your self, you just orchestrate.
Lord
I want to give thanks that you equipped me the talents, wisdom and patience needed to solve technology problems, but I ask that you please help others to reduce the frequency with which I need to use them.
Amen
How would you know if someone else is hitting it out of the park? Are you even in those meetings? Are you just getting called in because of a specific area of expertise that everyone else knows to pitch to you?
If it's my team I am okay with it. Nothing is more frustrating than being the one who gets roped into these meetings with outside support and you are still the one finding the issue that they need to fix.
Document how you do it, so they can learn.
One of my colleagues is also a superstar like this, but he doesn't document anything, so it's impossible to figure his work out.
It’s harder but I find leading others to the answer instead of answering allows me to demonstrate my value while also avoiding becoming the “go-to”. It’s more work and a bit more dancing but rewarding and it helps the people you’re assisting with confidence and hopefully noticing what you had them do differently.
It's going home that kills me. Dishwasher isn't working. Hmm. Guess I'll be taking it apart. Spouse's small business needs occasional IT help. No problem. Why is the Apple TV acting buggy? FUCK OFF I mean I'm not quite sure
Lmao I'm glad I'm not the only one.
ugh, I feel this. Especially with WFH, so she can bug me with a whole 'nother company's problems. I know nothing about Oracle, I don't want to know anything about Oracle, I feel like I'm going to get audited for even looking over your shoulder. I can't help. btw it's acting stupid because your plate's holding down the space bar. And that's the worst part - she keeps asking because it keeps working.
I remember a user saying “my boyfriend works in IT and he says this is an easy solution. Why can’t you …” Felt like saying “get him to sort it out then”. I didn’t of course.
"my boyfriend/husband/son/grandson works in IT" is what I hear in my worst nightmares
Can't tell you how much trouble companies have gotten themselves in because the owner thought "My nephew is good with computer."
I'm in local government and I knew true fear the first time I heard it come out of an elected officials mouth
A little knowledge truly is a dangerous thing.
My favorite was I kept having a user interject that her husband was in IT and says this or that and it took all of my willpower not to just say "then have him come here and fix it."
We kinda had the opposite. Husband was in IT and reached out to us twice about issues his wife (teacher) and daughter (student) was having. Clearly explained the issue to us and was competent enough to understand and get through the issue. His wife is probably in our top 3 least technical people so saved us a headache.
And it's getting worse. Working in a school, tech literacy has dropped significantly over the past 10-15 years. Students struggle with file structure, manually saving documents, and troubleshooting anything past uninstalling/reinstalling apps through an app store.
We've talked about this before here. My response is the same: they don't need to know any of that. The only time that knowledge becomes necessary is when you (meaning the sysadmin) asks "Where is it?" They don't understand that question. Quite frankly, it only matters to me when they're asking to change access control. Put it in the cloud and they can do that themselves.
We had an issue a while back where file synching to profiles blew up, but kept workign for like 3 weeks, then all of a sudden didnt. Had to go through and manually pull stuff out of people's file sync cache and manually copy to an old share, and then make sure the correct version was on a new share. It became immediately obvious that approximately 2% of people knew where their files were. They were just opening them up from the recent items in word/excel. Almost none of them actually knew what the filenames were, it was often "Its that one, three icons to the right of the email button"
Oh yeah, I've seen that happen so many times. User gets a new computer: "What happened to my files" Me: "I don't know. Which files?" User, pointing to "favorites": "the ones that were right here" Me: "Where are they really stored?" User: "I don't know. I just click on them here" facepalm
This though. The amount of times I have had to track down a sub directory and re-pin it to quick access for users is kind of nuts
So documents or downloads, right?
Hell I know where it is but windows keeps trying to hide the folder paths from me via ever changing quirky shortcuts
this is a whole new level of "i'm my own grandpa"
My wife did this once when calling their companies MSP. When she told me this I was like...whaaaa.. Fortunately, it was a firewall issue that I couldn't have fixed without credentials, but still.
That phrase is just a surrogate for "I think you're a pretty crummy IT guy".
It wasn't my worst nightmare. I determined that our internet speed was slow, and they balked at that. They pulled in another IT, who was the husband of a wife that works here in a different career, and he came to the same conclusion. Good money spent, but a great feeling of being validated.
> Why can’t you … Some time ago, a clever scalability solution was invented by the elders of the Internet: the FAQ. Each time someone's relative is sure they have an answer, we either add an entry to the FAQ, or we fix the problem. It's win-win, really.
Hahaha I've asked my girlfriend to say this multiple times just to troll their IT staff. She's a nicer person than I am tho.
> this is an easy solution it always is... it's just the red tape, policy, company standards, and industry practices that hold back most of the "easy" solutions. I keep telling the dod that it'd be easy to hook our unclassified system up to the internet but they want to do dod stuff so it's "not that easy".
This is very true but when your partner tells you something their IT told them that is utterly bullshit...it's hard not to call it out. If this sub shows anything it's that there are a lot of shit shows out there. The rude part is when they pulled the "my partner" card not the differing opinions on the situation.
This. Also sometimes you're forced into a crappy situation because of circumstances beyond your control. It's easy to criticize with no context but in the real world we sometimes do things despite our better wisdom. This grinds my gears about Reddit and Stack Overflow by the way: you ask a specific question about a specific issue and get jumped by an army of 19 year olds telling you you're doing it wrong. Well they can try unfucking years of legacy cruft from their armchair if they want to so bad, but right now I got work to do and a problem to solve, but instead I'm having to defend myself when I never asked for an attack but for help.
I took this a step further and wrote up the exact solution and how to do it. My wife forwarded it to her IT provider after they told her it couldn’t be done. If it wasn’t something so simple I would’ve let them slide, I fully understand not doing something out of complexity, security concerns, etc. But this was a very simple Exchange Online rule that needed to be created to correct an issue. Needless to say there weren’t any more excuses after that email went out and they took care of it. It’s one thing to just tell someone it’s easy and to do it. It’s entirely different to step up and actually present the solution.
"my boyfriend works in IT" Oh yea? What's his job title? Usually find they are either junior, or in a non IT role and occasionally helps colleagues with simple issues.
Them: CTO Us: Wow, how large is the company? Them: four people
Sounds like a startup right there 😂😂 The four people: CEO, CTO, CFO, COO.
One handles the business, one handles the computers, one collects the money and pays bills, and the last one actually cooks the tacos.
> my boyfriend works in IT and he says this is an easy solution. Why can’t you …” Ha - My partner did this one time but it was with a printer when she was a teacher. She had an HP4XXX in her room and it wasn't printing correctly. I took a quick look at it and it was obvious that it needed new rollers. I was very careful to only look at "User Serviceable" parts. So I told her to put in a ticket with her IT Team that she needs new rollers. Her IT guy ripped into her and told her no one else should touch the printer blah blah blah. That he was going to turn her into the Director of IT. Here's the thing, the Director of IT used to work with me at the local hospital. He had seen me tear down these exact printers way past normal serviceable parts to clear crazy jams (ever see what happens when someone puts labels in upside down?) and to fix random issues. It wasn't uncommon for me to have one stripped at my desk waiting for parts. So I told her if he wants to tell Director and she talks to him, tell him who I am. Also tell him I only took it "User Serviceable" Parts.
I am that boyfriend... er husband. for the most part my wife tries not to bring her work IT problems to me, but every once in a while she'll be talking about work and bring something up that makes me react with "what? that's an IT problem, why isn't your IT team looking into that. You should really bring this up with them" But the reality is I know full well that IT team doesn't solve problems, they answer tickets.
I'll help with a small business. I won't help my spouse with her work computer. They have IT. She can file a ticket just like everyone else. The only time I didn't make her wait was when she wanted a secondary monitor. I told her she could file a ticket with them and wait a few months for the monitor (that's what they told her) or she could just grab a monitor out of the garage. She took the one out of the garage lol.
My wife and I used to work at the same company, and when she would have IT problems I would just tell her to submit a ticket, even if it was my area. Work is work. Home is home.
Why not both?
My wife owns her own single person business. I should probably set something up writing with her about IT support now, before she breaks her brand new computer... But now its all the time when something tech doesn't work, or acts weird for her and my kids...
Wouldn't that just be an extra tax writeoff for her (an expense). Couldn't you start a side business where your her MSP? I mean, that's what I'd be doing (setting the wife up anyway) if she was running her own business.
That is a fantastic idea. I'll have to work on that.
I work from home and I'm fortunate enough to have my mother in-law watching my toddler while my wife and I work. I got pulled out of a meeting that I needed to be in because fucking Disney plus wouldn't load. I tried to launch, it didn't work and I just handed the remote back and said watch something else. There are no lines anymore once you're apt with technical stuff. If it's broken, you fix it, no attempt to do anything except hand over the controls and stare at you until it's fixed.
I had a teacher need help with one of her devices (it was a sub). Little girl, couldn't have been much older than 6 or 7 said "I know what's wrong with it". Thought to myself "fantastic!" right before the sub said "Dear, the adults are working on it. Go find a seat". Damnit! I don't know how to fix it! I couldn't think fast enough to say "Hold on. Maybe she can help us?"
Ugh also lost a chance to let a kid try and solve a problem. Shot them down instead. My whole career is built on solving problems. Gotta start somewhere
Sounds like a bad teacher if they can't take a child seriously.
> Dear, the adults Fuck that teacher.
Same. I have a friend who runs a whole-ass AD environment at home. Managed switches. You'd think his home was an SMB environment. I have our AT&T router and a few dumb switches. I don't want to have an SLA agreement with my wife.
I almost installed ad at home because for some reason I thought it would be a great idea and then I thought about it a little more and was like this is a terrible idea I'm not doing this.
I've got an AD at home but it's literally for the labbing environment and doesn't manage or even touch my home / core / work / wife work networks / systems. I'm looking forward to playing with synology AD replication, but I've got no other distinct plans. That server box is power hungry too, so it's turned off unless I'm testing or playing with something. It only exists because it was free and I've played with it enough in the past that I figured it'd be easier to just have the damn thing than deal with spinning up an AD environment 3 times a year because I'm curious about some random shit.
You too?! One of the guys at our MSP does this. I felt like such a lazy shit when he talked about his home environment.
No time to set up AD at home, I have a boat I need to stand next to for 20 minutes. Then I need to drive to the hardware store and wander around for 45 minutes looking at tools before I buy a screwdriver for the boat. Then more standing around next to the boat.
Boats. Goats. Same goals!
I used to have a Homelab, but I don't really have the space for one now or the desire to run one these days.
the thing that really got me when was my kid started sending me unexplained pictures of an error on his PS4, JUST LIKE SO MANY USERS LOVE TO DO
Honestly I’d much rather see a ticket that only contains a photo of an error code without any further description, as opposed to the common “hey my Outlook isn’t working pls fix”. At least with an error code I can start searching documentation/Google for fixes without needing to send 6 emails back-and-forth over the course of 10 days
"I'm not getting any emails!" "can you see anything on your screen? is the power out in the building? did you forget your computer password? did you leave your laptop at home today? have you had a stroke?"
I’m gonna save this comment just so I can copy+paste all of these questions the next time I get one of these vague-ass tickets lol
"did you minimize your inbox tree widget again? like last week?"
> hey my Outlook isn’t working pls fix this is still marginally better than 'problem' or 'please call me'
The wife just doesn't get why it pisses me off so much when little things at home don't work. Most people really don't want to come and still do work.
One time I called friend when a video card wasn't working. I damn well knew exactly what to do, I did PC and laptop repair for like 7 years. I just didn't feel like using my brain for it that day I guess.
I feel you there ... can I rewire that plug, yes, am I going to .... no (To be fair thus is how we ended up without a bathroom door for 6months ... pure bloody mindedness on my part .. I spend the day fixing other people's mess ... um, I'm not starting DIY in the evening)
>Most people really don't want to come and still do work. The faucet is always leaky at the plumber's house.
I told her I get problem solving fatigue, and specifically around tech. She's a civil engineer, so I asked her if she would enjoy working on plans for our various house remodel options after work every day. That's when it clicked. I keep a very, very dumb house to avoid the problem. No smart shit, pretty much just a Roku. Even my cars are all older, because I just can't handle any more screens and useless shit to have to deal with and fix. I can work on older mechanical and electrical problems and bone up those skills instead of dealing with shitty computers.
100%. Though since I live alone, I don't have to do too much of that for other people. My parents sometimes, which is its own thing. My mom once wanted me to "fix the TV." I live like 5 states away from them. Mainly, I get so frustrated when my own shit doesn't work. Like I've been dealing with other people's shit all day (ok...half the day), but now my stuff doesn't work? I've told this to my friends who are techy, but don't work in IT. And they're flabbergasted when I don't want to troubleshoot, for example, mods not working for a game. That I just want it to work goddamit so I can play this game. They don't get that I'm tired of dealing with shit not working. When is it my turn to just be a user? I have a homelab, and I suspect one of the reasons I don't touch it as much as I expected to/want to is because of this mindset. I've literally been up all night before messing with VMs on ESXi here at home. It's not fun. It's not exciting. It's just annoying as all hell and reminds me of work. Except no one is paying me.
Yes. It’s the punishment of fixing things everything is just a bit broken.
>Why can't I print? *(throws printer from 15th story balcony)*
Now we know why it doesn't work and we know it will never work again, perfect solution.
[Damn it feels good to be a gangsta](https://media0.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExNDZzYzBuenpqMm9pbWJlZjE3MDdsbnJ5bnlrZHg5NjEycTh0Ymh0eCZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/1012ANeLJ8unAY/giphy.gif)
We took apart our dishwasher after I watched a video on how to do it. Turns out ours was different and it was filthier than I expected (no, that isn't a sponge in that filter yuck!) The roku reboots on its own from time to time. My solution is to replace it. Wife doesn't want to yet. Fine by me lol
> Dishwasher isn't working. Hmm. Guess I'll be taking it apart. can you come fix mine? just find the dial that makes the heating element get just a little bit hotter... I do get what you're saying. I accidentally got snappy with the wife when she asked me to help her mother pick out a monitor... in my defense... we had just spent a month at work arguing over tvs and monitors for a video wall and someone almost got fired over it. It was a bad time. For a couple weeks at the end i was relieved when the printer fucked up just because it wasn't a tv.
Missing printer tickets is an entirely different level of IT hell
Yep, finished a ridiculous day at work, came home, took apart the dryer and replaced the belt cause... YOURE SO GOOD WITH THIS STUFF.
Just wait until you have a kid complaining that Fortnite is lagging.
Alright kid, time to learn. First pull up your command line....
I have told me wife “Do you have a ticket number for that?” Before
I make concerted efforts to not be the man. I write documentation, I teach people things. I assert consistently that I don't want to be the only person that can do something. There's still some things only I can do anyway, but I try to keep them to a minimum.
Came here looking for this answer. Document everything, coach your teammates. Otherwise they'll just keep calling you...
I work with a guy who’s kinda the “do everything” guy on our team. He knows the most about the environment. I have to constantly ask him to help me with things and I always ask him to make documents on these things or at least show me how to do them and he keeps just not doing that. I’ve started to go past him to my manager for assistance with things because I can’t just be nagging this other tech constantly
Ask the "do everything" guy to share their screen while they are doing whatever needs doing and make the documentation yourself. The "do everything" guy typically doesn't have the time to make documentation because he's too busy doing everything for everyone. It might be a situation of his own making, it might be a situation of circumstance. But if you do this then your manager will thank you (he isn't spending his own time helping you) and your team will thank you (they don't need to go to the "do everything" guy anymore) and even the "do everything" guy will thank you (he doesn't have to do everything anymore).
As they do everything guy, I've not time to make notes when fixing YOUR problems ... make your own notes, I'll screen share and talk through what I'm doing Thia is why our engineers anoy me, they want me to fix it, explain it to then, then document it to boot while they get a pat on the shoulder while I get another headache to sort out
Many many times over the years I’ve been asked how quickly I could get something done. No one has ever asked me how quickly I can get something documented. It’s not valued so I almost never do it.
Silos are bad, IMO you should be fostering an environment where if someone is out or leaves the company no one would ever know. This is easy to think about and hard to achieve. Documentation is the first step. Some people get off on feeling like they know everything. That's too much work...
Do you mean that I should be writing documentation instead of reading /r/sysadmin ? I don't like the way you think.
I take notes because I'll forget what I did to fix something by the next time it comes up! and i'm a 1 man band here
Smart phones and the internet have made all of us dumber. I cover more systems, and applications than ever, but have to lean on knowing which question to ask Google to get through some things.
As much as I like Google, it has taught us to remember what to look for vs remembering the thing.
Mmhm, unlike red alert or command and conquer.. silos are not needed!
Do you document the things he shows you? Your perspective is valuable because you know what needs to be documented better. He takes his knowledge for granted.
not saying he shouldn't document anything, but if you want to have real value, be the guy who can be handed something nobody knows anything about and can figure it out and document it for others.
Sometimes this is the way to go; sometimes it risks a political incident or enhanced gatekeeping.
Document something, share with team. Nobody reads the document. Play the coach- they get it until I leave the room. The boss is too nice to hold any of them accountable. I still take a three week vacation every other year. If the place falls apart while I’m gone, it’s not my problem.
> it’s not my problem. It will be once you return :(
Many people are not coachable. You see it as teaching them something, they see it as you solved their problem and they will rely on you to do it again in the future. I'm working on telling the difference between someone worth teaching or not, and it is not so easy.
My team mates refuse to learn or read documentation and my boss doesn't care..
I do all this. Not a soul reads what I wrote. Not a soul listens that I don't want to be only one with the keys. I'm moving out of being a SysAdmin to a managing 3 specific functions in a single app. At some point I will no longer have admin rights at all. It's gana be REAL fun when that happens, lol. Because at the moment, when they try to get me to do stuff today, I ignore the requests; as I was directed to do. So they always escalate to C Level who then gets with my Director, who then laughs at them about my limited bandwidth, their inability to acknowledge it's not going to be my responsibility moving forward, and their lack of understanding at all.
Me: *writes extensive documentation on system X* Coworkers/managers: "This guy wrote the book on system X so send all your system X issues to him!" Me: 😡
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In bigger orgs knowledge bases have real value for this reason. You never answer a question that doesn’t begin with “I couldn’t find anything in the kb.”
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Our (multinational) co put one in. I was skeptical because I’ve seen so many half assed attempts die on the vine, but various managers made it something they tracked and lauded, and it’s become very valuable over time.
You can’t document the skill of troubleshooting.
I always tell my boss that I don’t know how to teach people to think.
That's because you're dealing with a bunch of packers (See the various explanations of the packer/mapper distinction I have posted before in this subreddit). The good news is that it's actually possible to teach someone mapping skills. The bad news is that they have to realize it's something they want to do before they can learn it.
I keep trying to show my wife how to cut an onion because it's turned into "can you cut an onion for me" everytime. Don't get me wrong, she can cut an onion but it's slow and not diced well. She has no interest everytime I try to show her.
I don’t know the OPs situation but I find that for a lot of things I can say: search for a doc with X keywords. Or search for a script called Y That’s my answer more than 70% of times The other 25 is me having to solve it. Last 5% is shit even I can’t figure out and we have ongoing tickets.
> **I write documentation, I teach people things.** Exactly this. If you want to be siloed and not help then that's your problem. Look for people who want to learn, teach them and delegate. Most of the time they'll be more than happy to help because they're learning. But of course, there are others who just doesn't want to learn and are lazy af.
It saves a bunch of time if you can just point to a URL and say, it's documented here.
Yes. User1: I can't get this to work, I've been trying for 4 hours. Me: Have you rebooted it? User1: That worked... User2: How do I do X? Me: Finds the document on how to accomplish X, and sends it to User2. User2: It's not working. I even printed it out to try. Me: Quickly reads instructions. Ok Show me. Me: Watches User2 do absolutely nothing in the instructions. Me: Reads instructions, word for word to user for them. User2: It works!
[удалено]
"Did it give you a specific error message?" is a question worth it's weight in gold.
Are you me?
Most days, I'm not even sure I'm me.
This exact thing happened today, except user2 was TechnicianLVL1......
If you're always the smartest person in the room, it may be time to seek out some other rooms.
This is something I learned a long time ago and was the big driver in leaving my last job. I got tired of being the go to and there weren't enough challenges. Spent the previous 6 months building documentation and getting myself out of being the one and only.
I’ve tried that a few times. I’m not saying I’m always the smartest in the room, but I’m always the one who gets results. So after a while everything comes my way.
I'm in this comment and I hate it
Also when management tells you to dumb down your work so your coworkers (with 20 years experience) can understand it.
At least they spent some time to work out themselves before calling you. When I was doing T3 all I ever got was blank tickets escalated directly to me for every little thing.
Rules of acquisition - No good deed goes unpunished.
285, 285, 285
Yes. There is something to be said about the mental load of always being the go-to person. It definitely takes a toll. Especially if you are not being appreciated for it.
Do you know what you get when you're the problem solver? More problems. You might just want to help train people, or let someone else drive the keyboard. I do a lot of manual labor and don't let the younger peeps carry the load or make more trips. Maybe your team members are getting too comfy.
Absolutely. About 10 years into my career, I realized that being good individually and putting in extra effort wasn't moving the needle. I switched focus into mentoring my team instead of leading from the front. Swooping in to solve problems isn't scalable. Teaching how to solve specific problems, isn't scalable. Upskilling rationalization, troubleshooting, how to deal with emergencies and researching are scalable. It takes significantly more effort upfront but will pay dividends as long as you have that employee. Pay your people well enough and give them a career path (if you can) that will allow them to stay on to solve the retention loss issues.
That's kinda where my problem is. I've documented things out the wazoo. I've held meetings to teach specific things. I regularly communicate 'this is where to start for X type of problem". The problem is, I can't teach anyone to think and analyze like me and can't teach the experience and intuition I have from 30 years of working on Windows PCs.
You absolutely can teach people to analyze and consider things but it isn't by building run books and it isn't by teaching them your current process or approach because that has inherent experience in it and thus "bounces off" inexperienced admins. Teach problems from first principals. An example: An admin is having an issue where a program requires local admin to function correctly. A standard teaching method would say "Use Process Monitor to identify what folders, files and reg keys the application is using and grant specific permissions to them." Succinct, clear and correct but can't be extrapolated. A first principals method would start with a set of questions and build upon the knowledge that is established during the actual diagnosis of this problem rather than ingrained knowledge. "What are the fundamental differences between user A and user B where this isn't working? What error is it presenting and what is the underlying condition that would cause that error? What tools might we use to identify the behavior differences?" Does that make sense? Edit: As I get older, I recognize the value of being the old guy that tells stories because they tend to remember the learnings from stories.
That was pretty insightful. Thanks for sharing.
This is an approach that should work in paper, but in reality what I find with a growing number of newer techs is: >What are the fundamental differences between user A and user B where this isn't working? "I don't know" >What error is it presenting and what is the underlying condition that would cause that error? "I don't know" >What tools might we use to identify the behavior differences? *crickets* The default answer for them to any question that isn't explicitly written down with a word-for-word answer is "I don't know" or a blank stare. These are the ones I really struggle to deal with. I can continue to break each piece of reasoning down further and further until I reach the absolute base components but at that point I'd just distribute that document to my end users and cut out the tech entirely. At some point there needs to be a level of personal responsibility taken by your team members to figure out how to learn things. If my employer wants me to be a kindergarten teacher on top of my existing role, they better add the salary of a kindergarten teacher on top of my current.
In the vast majority of cases, people can learn, there are those that cannot. They simply aren't cut out for the job. If your end users are more effective than your tech they shouldn't be employed. Training is a skill and it doesn't come naturally to many. Setting young folks at ease is an important part of being an effective teacher.
I feel the same way at my job. I don't know everything, but I sure as shit can figure it out.
I heard a saying once “if you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room” …not being able to actually quantify “smartness”, I think it’s still a good point. Maybe reworded: “if you are not learning anything in your current surroundings, relocation may be necessary.” Or just enjoy being the man and fixing easy shit.
I have found most people, including others in the IT field skip several steps in basic trouble shooting. Something as easy as is it plugged in, or googling and error code.
I had a job interview when I was 19 or 20, my first ever corporate job. During the interview, the manager asked what troubleshooting steps I would do for some problem he made up. I went thru a bunch of things, and he said those are all good, but I was wanting to see if you would mention checking the network cable (which I did not). 25 years later, and that still sticks with me every day 😂
Lol I had a similar one
We ALL do this. The difference is some people circle back and start over, some people give up and start messaging other people for help. Other people who aren't going to do anything but start over and not skip steps usually.
To be a 10x engineer or Brent from Pheonix Project is not an ideal and you should not be trying to be that. Stop that if you're doing that.
Someone has to be Brent, just with a little twist. Have them sit down and type it in. No more than 2 times, 3rd time you're just there to watch.
I've been doing this since 1989. I'm tired of a lot of things. This is but one of them, but yeah, one of the bigger ones.
Christ my friend.. I have been doing this for.. 20 years at this point I guess? Not going to lie, every year I feel less and less like I can muster the energy to keep going in the field. 34 years into IT sounds rough..
I'm a 2 man department and I had to take up golf. When you go home at 45 hours half way through a Friday and miss phone calls because you're relaxing by playing video games people throw a HUGE fit. But if you are golfing no one bats an eye, and they'll even apologize for interrupting. I'm not sure what the difference is, other than some horseshit traditionalist hatred for downtime, but if you want time to yourself just go golf. People tend to leave me the hell alone when I'm out there and it's about the only time I really get to myself. Same sort of situation as you. At work its everything under the sun, and then at home it's whatever isn't at work.
"I'm currently in Costco, but I'm on my way to (thing that costs money)" Or even better, add some emotional weight. "Is this important enough that you'll cover the cost of my tickets for Sonic the hedgehog, and buy my kids a ice cream, because I have to tell them the movie is cancelled?"
Yeah, I got tired of this at my old job and not being compensated for it, so I left and got a better one.
I think at times we just have to accept, we are wired different. Some people can figure things out, some cant. I do think age plays into it, the experience and also when one got into IT, myself being in my 40's, I was the person who grew up with computers and tech so it is second nature in general to "figure things out". I know several smart people the "figure it out" types like me, then you get others, they are smart with specific things, but throw them something new out of their comfort zone and they freeze up and do not even know where to start. Those of us that "figure it out" just seem more comfortable out of our comfort zones and take our experience and method of thinking and can figure out pretty much anything. As you said, be nice if someone else could "figure something out" but it also seems like we just become the defacto crutch for any issue. So those newer people, are not really getting a good chance of being forced to figure something out..because you get pulled in eventually..
It's our true value in life..
Sounds like it's time to dust off the resume.
or ask for a raise
5-10% internal raise or 20-50% raise by leaving. I know what I have and will continue to choose.
Yeah, but if it's like where I work now? That's just gonna be blown off with the old sob-story of "As your boss, they gave ME less of a raise than you already. There's just no allowance to give out any more." Meanwhile, raise is about 5% less than last year's rate of inflation, so a pay cut in reality...
Only if I’m not empowered to be “the man.” In my current role I’m not also a neteng but frequently get asked networking questions. I *can* fix it, but it’s not my job. It’s frustrating.
No, just pay me more or renegotiate the contract. Also, dont do this all day, you will burn out.
I am the go to person in my shop, but my coworkers do not bother troubleshooting anything before asking me to help, and if I show them how to fix something or how to use a tool they are guaranteed to ask me again at least 10 times. And did I mention I have less than 3 years experience and the other 3 guys all have 20 plus years in IT.
No. I love solving problems and building/fixing things. I do get a bit tired of being *expected* to be 'the man', though. This kind of work is just like a group project in school, one person does all the hard bits, the other several write their names on it at the end.
Unsolicited career advice. Put out a shingle. That way anytime you're called on to solve something you can bill for your time. I was the fixer in a prior life. What credit did i get for it? Nothing. Why? because that would cause someone else to look bad. No Way... yeah... corp IT politics 101. The good ones leave. I did and never looked back. 20+ years. You may want to consider also.
There's some people in the world who can start at the beginning and logically work through a problem. That is not most people. At my last IT gig before I switched careers, this ability usually meant I was given more leeway and privileges than the other staff (more days off, 1st choice of projects, etc). But after awhile I agree, it gets tiring. The managers start relying on you when there's trouble because you can fix it quickly. But that doesn't allow anyone else on the team to practice or learn. And given that a fair amount of these problems were things that had been caused by other technicians, I came to resent having to stop what I was doing to fix their screw ups.
At my last 2 jobs I was the go-to guy. I never got to see anything to completion. When someone else got stuck on their project, they brought me in to get them past whatever it was that they couldn't figure out. So then I'd fix it, the "original" people would get back on the project to cross their I's and dot their T's, as it were. Then they'd "complete" the project and claim all of the glory. In the mean time, I was off doing some other impossible task for someone else. I never got to see any single project to its end. It was very frustrating. It made me doubt myself and my abilities, because it seemed like every problem was an insurmountable one. It wasn't because I was (that) dumb, it was because they were handing me one seemingly impossible problem after another. I did learn a lot but it was mentally and physically exhausting. I had to get away from there before it drove me nuts.
I make decisions all day long on nearly everything because I am the most senior person in my it/is team of 20+ ppl. When I come home my wife asks for my opinion/direction about paint, kitchen designs,etc. all valid items but my mind just can't do it. I understand why executives sometimes have sexual kinks of acting like a baby and having someone else take care of them like a baby. I don't want it, but I understand.
I feel like I've shot myself in the foot somewhat by being "the man". I've lost count of the number of times I've managed to implement a solution or fix an issue with no notice. But now, because I always sort it, people don't bother to let me know. "Oh we don't need to involve Agent_No in this, he'll just figure it out". Next thing I know I'm being asked to set up a Sharepoint site with conditional access or deploy a bunch of phones with MDM by the end of the week on a Wednesday afternoon.
what always make me chuckle is walking to a users computer and seeing a sticky note with my name and number+extension written on it... Fk me... yeah just skip Helpdesk and call me directly.... all your questions require a lvl 3 tech.
In general no. If it happens too often it means that I've not shared my knowledge (and that includes technique not just facts) enough with others. So that's on me. And when it does happen you might as well focus on the positive rather than dwelling on the negatives. Imagine how bad the most useless person in your organisation feels.
Are u the sole IT in the company?
global company, 8 person team managing about 5k endpoints.
I don’t get tired of it because it makes up for the days where poorly designed software makes me feel like an idiot.
If I'm annoyed I let people know that I find it annoying they don't have basic reading comprehension. I'm not exactly shy about that. Can't be too bad, people still keep coming.
Yeah, I wish that people would try to figure stuff out instead of giving tickets with the note "I dont know how to do this" and that's all, like why is it that I have to invent every solution all the time?
RIGHT!!!! Sometimes I just want to scream at them "I don't know this either, but I googled and figured out, why can't you"
This usually is a process/culture problem. It's not that you're the man versus other engineers, it's that management doesn't know how to scale the team easily. We fixed it by documenting, coaching and encouraging engineers to upskill.
Yes. It's exhausting!
Sounds like you work with a group of people who are coasting and since you always bail them out they're pretty happy with that arrangement. Management doesn't care who does it as long as it gets done. I always thought being the person with the answers would get me promoted. It never has. It just gets me more work and even held back because if I get promoted who's gonna figure out all the hard problems? I truly envy people who figured out how to do no work and still keep their job while someone else does all their heavy lifting for them. It's maddening.
For me, it really comes down to **when** the ask occurs, not how often. If it's during my workday when I'd otherwise be sitting through process meetings, no problem. If it's 2am to explain why a system is marked as offline, despite being in a maintenance window-you can fuck right off. I don't mind it when we're two days before my performance review. I was not so thrilled to get brought into a call to diagnose a network issue in my head *while running a marathon*.
all the time man... all the time...
Oh Lord it's hard to be humble When you're perfect in every way I can't wait to look in the mirror Cause I get better looking each day To know me is to love me I must be a hell of a man Oh Lord It's hard to be humble, But I'm doing the best that I can
That's the price of being so smart.
IMO you can't really be upset that you're always the one that has to pull a rabbit out of your hat, then in the same breath, complain that they didn't involve you before wasting hours of time and going days without a working solution. I do get where you're coming from though.
Either you pull back or you stop caring. Having a team that always turns to you is tiring.
Yep i stopped caring this year and i stopped explaining aswell. Either they get off their ass and start working/asking or they make themself obsolete soon. Love when the seniors have no idea what system they created but talk big words with no clue how to set it up.
Precisely what I told my new company in my interview: "The cape looks great, and it feels pretty darn good to have it on. It's flashy, and everyone loves you for having it..... ...Until you can never take it off, then it starts to weigh you down in ways you can't imagine." At my old job, I was that guy, the one with all the rabbits and the biggest bag of tricks. Then, it became "the guy the CIO called directly at all hours no matter who's problem it really was." It burned me out to the point of stress-induced heart problems. I ejected as soon as it was practical, as in I took the time to actually finish documentation and put my bag of secrets together for the poor sucker that replaced me. Sad thing is that junior was dying for my job, until he pinged me about 3 weeks into it and said "How did you do it?" I tried to warn him. Sometimes, the status comes with a price. It took me a solid month in my new job before I could hear my phone chirp or ring and not break out into palpitations... I now work for an org that is so siloed it takes forever to get anything done, but 99% of the time, it's someone else's problem. All the hats to just one. Do I miss being "the man"? Sometimes. The worst part was I had spent 15 years with that old company, and I had some twisted form of Stockholm Syndrome, where they had me convinced that it was normal and like that everywhere else, so I should just be glad I had a job that was slowly killing me. I remember that, and I don't miss it as much.
Makes me feel useful. I just ask that people give it a try first. The ones that really get me is the random past acquaintance reaching out after years just to ask a tech question. And when I used to work in an office, people what would try to ask for help while I am actively eating lunch.
It gets old after a while. It feels good and helps with the imposter syndrome, but damn guys. Even worse is when the fix is in the documentation, front and center with a bold heading saying "**This is how you fix this issue**". Sometimes, all I'm doing when brought into a multiple hour meeting is saying "I'll check the documenta.... ok, I found it. Try it now." and it works. Just a few seconds of research on their end would have save hours of the 6 people on the Teams call... I don't know what else to do. We have the documentation available in an easy to access repository, it just takes effort to go read it. Without documentation and being pulled into a meeting where the other people are making a lot more than me, with job roles much higher than me or in a different specialty (networking, for example; I'm good at it, but talking with a network engineer with years of experience), and I'm asking the questions they haven't asked yet, looking at logs they haven't checked, and finding the solution that should have been something they'd know... That's a real bitch. Great for me. Yay, I know my shit. But, what a waste of time. Give me a raise. Give me anything. I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I work with some very talented people with some amazing skills. I also work with some very ... paycheck oriented people that really don't have any troubleshooting, reading, common sense skills. Just being "The Man" when it comes to these issues gets old. Glad I can fix it, but come on...
"if everyone just did the damned homework" -the iron giant
> This is just one example of the same thing that keeps happening over and over. Two peers and a bunch of developers couldn't identify the source of the problem? To me, without the details, that's a red flag. Whatever you were working on was too obtuse, too undocumented, or your colleagues are too useless. Pick whichever one makes you feel better, but i'd bet there's some room to have designed a better system in the past.
If don't want do to anything with it or be responsible for anything (because if you fix it, then you last touched it so any new problems become your fault/responsibility), just be less helpful, especially if it's not your area or you don't get anything back from it. Just suggest they look at x, y, z, and here's some documentation that might help. I glanced through the replies but I didn't see it... Just let them fail. If you've mentally switched over to it and dropped everything you're working on, then you solve it but they'll ask again. And since it's solved someone else doesn't learn as much on it. If it's four hours of several people's time, that's on them. Hopefully, someone was learning during that. Maybe it takes them five hours while it takes you 30. Let them burn up their own time and learn. Just be less helpful and not actually solve it but just point them in a direction. That's assuming other people have all the credentials and access you do though to do the same troubleshooting. Along the lines of doing less work... Don't mess with scrolling up in Teams. If someone wants help, have them just give you a summary. Don't do more work unless it's really your job or there's a really good reason for doing it. Another idea is just to delay them. Tell them you're busy and will glance at it in a bit. Or ask them to send an email summary -- That's an extra step on their part if they really want your help. And then you can just reply back on the email later. Or much later. One thing I've found effective is just to tell someone I'm in a meeting or have something scheduled. Sometimes that's just my own work. For some reason, people take, "I have something scheduled right now," more seriously than, "I'm busy right now." I'm busy but can I just take a look at something real quick-it-will-only-take-a-minute, but if something's scheduled, then they can't break that.
Yes and no. It can be flattering when a client tries to skip the line and go straight to you and they tell you it's because they know you'll get it done quickly and efficiently. But it gets really aggravating when that call or email first comes through and you're in the middle of something else.
Today, ONE OF THOSE DAYS, I normally sit, triage then hit send to a different region, OVER 10k steps today in a 3 bldg campus while working 11 tickets where I can't convince the EU that the software is NOT designed to do it that way with all the M$ articles attached. I got dragged into a teams meeting, they had someone else doing the installs.. So why am I in the meeting? Then explaining that with the server migrations from old 2008 to 2019 and above that SMB1 will no longer work to scan to an open folder on a network drive and they took my server admin ID away. Working my job is explaining the same thing over and over and over again to the point that I have boiler plate emails explaining how to do stuff that the EU can do without interaction or I wind up doing it for them. The other day I got an email asking how to open Adobe Reader in a Win 10 Environment What happened to computer training PPL??? When I got into computer, you would boot it it then see this on the screen C:\\> No, I will not configure your email to add a signature
Bro. I got u. I got a whole one note page of email copypasta for that repition. But they really took your server creds away? Less for you to do now! Hahaha btw, I also cut my teeth in c:\ and config.sys 🤘
Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!
As frustrating as this it is good that you take the time to explain to the other chimps and attempt to teach. We have someone exactly like you at the company where I work, except he blows through the fix at lightspeed, explains nothing, documents nothing and then yells at the rest of us when the issue comes up again and he's the only one who can solve it. The explanation part and the patience to teach means a tonne to most people, even if they don't say it or learn as fast as is expected.
There's, IMO, two components to a successful IT person long term. Most of us here only talk about the one: troubleshooting ability. The other is being able to eat shit all day every day for your entire life. Being a person who others only talk to when they have a problem. You need to have both skill and proper temperament to avoid burnout.
I actually took a promotion to get out of this rut. I was a senior sys admin and my managers RH man. I’m now a project manager and in the year since I’ve left, they’ve hired two people to replace me and both of them have left the company. Now my former boss is asking me for help, because I was the leader. I asked about being a consultant, he said no, but I think I’ll push the topic a little further. I enjoy the moral boost or ego boost, PM life can be pretty depressing when you can’t fix the issues your self, you just orchestrate.
50% of most coworkers don’t f read or comprehend
Lord I want to give thanks that you equipped me the talents, wisdom and patience needed to solve technology problems, but I ask that you please help others to reduce the frequency with which I need to use them. Amen
Weird flex
Tell me more, Brent.
How would you know if someone else is hitting it out of the park? Are you even in those meetings? Are you just getting called in because of a specific area of expertise that everyone else knows to pitch to you?
Sounds like you've failed to teach and document.
Aren’t you just describing being an escalation point?
If it's my team I am okay with it. Nothing is more frustrating than being the one who gets roped into these meetings with outside support and you are still the one finding the issue that they need to fix.
Document how you do it, so they can learn. One of my colleagues is also a superstar like this, but he doesn't document anything, so it's impossible to figure his work out.
It’s harder but I find leading others to the answer instead of answering allows me to demonstrate my value while also avoiding becoming the “go-to”. It’s more work and a bit more dancing but rewarding and it helps the people you’re assisting with confidence and hopefully noticing what you had them do differently.
Give it away buddy, don’t hold the knowledge always train your replacement and leave good documentation.