Fun story, I worked IT for an American Telecom company. One day I recieved a phone call from a guy who was setting up his router. We were maybe five minutes into troubleshooting. He asks if he can eat his dinner while we troubleshoot and I say “no worries”. Within thirty seconds, I hear a bang and panicd screaming. He informs me he dumped soy sauce and rice all over his router and work space. I sent a field tech to replace the router and set it up.
I worked at an office once where the wifi legitimately got worse when it rained. It was because the buildings internet used an antenna instead of being wired, and the building was just barely in range of the source signal. When it rained, it was enough added distortion to make it noticeably worse.
I have to constantly explain to my wife that if she can’t reach a website it is likely on their end and there is nothing I can do until they fix it. I explain there is a chain of connections involved and me sitting and staring at her laptop for an hour isn’t going to fix it.
I actually want to get into IT. I like tech, don’t mind dumb situations, and enjoy helping people, and doubly so if it’s sarcastically helping people. Fucking shame every company wants like fourteen degrees and your first born for a level 1.
So I’m going to go against the grain here and say to get some college under your belt. A 2 year degree and a cert or two (which can even be part of your degree program, or sometimes will allow you to skip some classes saving you time and money) will easily get you into a helpdesk job, and from there you can go into whatever specialization ends up tickling your fancy.
I’ll also say, helping someone with their nth password reset doesn’t have to suck. Sometimes there’s a root cause that you can help with which makes you far more helpful than the tech who just helps them reset it 10 more times. One of my proudest achievements in a previous role was successfully teaching all of our users who’d email us a scan of a printout of a screenshot of an error message how to send us the screenshot directly, and we went from 1 ticket like that per week to none for my final 6 months. All it takes is some compassion and meeting the users where they are without judgment for the common goal of getting both of our jobs done a little easier.
Unfortunately I’m already dealing with student loans and two degrees under my belt. So certifications and a shotgun approach to applications might be my least stressful path. I’ve always been tech support for friends and family, have built several computers, and good lord the micro Chernobyl event that was a PC I left with my parents and younger sister when I went away for several months. “Oh that? It just stopped working one day.” Did you know that back on I think Win7 you can bypass some start up errors by mashing the backspace key like you’re a triple expresso’d up Sonic? Cause that was the only way it’d even let me scoot into the actual boot process once I did what I could in safe mode.
Ah so a very different point in your career than most of us seem to have thought. Probably your best bet is to get an easy cert that shows basic PC knowledge and/or start throwing applications out in all directions. If you can get 6-12 months on your resume at a slog of a callcenter or other shitty entry level support role that should be enough to kickstart you into an IT career if that’s the direction you want to go. Get onto a corporate helpdesk and use that time to figure out what you need to learn and go from there.
I’m a hiring manager for a tier 1 help desk and soft skills and being able to deal with users who are bad with technology are way more important than any certification at that level. I can teach someone to do the technical stuff if they have a good attitude. If they have a shitty attitude and get frustrated on every call where the user has trouble following instructions there’s not much I can do for them. Don’t let your lack of certs/degree stop you from applying. You may end up someplace that’s desperate to get asses in seats (usually for good reason) for a bit but once you get some experience on your resume you’ll have an easier time finding someplace better.
I have zero issues helping people, I love it. What I won’t do it help people with the same issue over and over because they won’t pay attention and refuse to learn. Nothing pisses me off faster than repeating myself over and over and having to keep resetting your password and setup your VPN because you keep going into the settings and fucking with it instead of just connecting like we did when I taught you how.
Currently dealing with a guy with 2 Mac’s, a mini and pro and everyday one of them isn’t working because he keeps going to the VPN and changing shit rather than clicking “connect” from the task menu. Jesus fuck it’s annoying.
Others have said here but for a help desk job it’s definitely more based on customer service ability. I came in from an admin job with a very long time in customer service prior to that but no other actual certs other than just being the person that people go to in the office for help and was told by my hiring manager it’s much more about ability to handle clients.
Now the next steps in my career I’m more worried about because it’s all very competitive at least where I am and everyone seems much more involved and knowledgeable of technology than I am. I know I can learn but it is pretty overwhelming.
The majority of people are genuinely thankful for your help. Sometimes they put off asking for help until they are very frustrated and you catch some of that heat but they calm down quickly. They also really like it if you have to sit down and work on their computer because it means they have an excuse to not work and have some coffee. There always seems to be that one person though that you dread helping because they are always pissy and sarcastic and blame you for everything.
I have had an IT role and been a controls engineer for many years now. There is a fair amount of overlap in duties and you only need one degree for that. Basically, a lot of it is IT for machinery. I have a hell desk support team who keeps most of the basics at bay and every time they all get sick at once I remember why I love them.
I like how you skipped the preludes and just call them the hell desk. I am 100% sure that isn’t a typo and I’m never going to check to see if you edit it just in case.
Certifications certifications certifications. Get your A+ or net+, apply for shitty remote help desk jobs like support.com. They will suck and you’ll get back to back calls, but keep your ears to the ground and a few months experience should be all you need to hop to something else. A lot of places are desperate for competent techs. Degrees don’t prove anything, I’m fact it seems like kids are graduating with these technical degrees and zero actual practical knowledge.
Source: My decade long IT career off just an associates degree.
I can confirm this. I was able to get a decent job right out of highschool with my certs I got at a technical college. Really as long as you can prove that you’re a fast learner, passionate about tech, and have the skillet to back it up it’s not hard to find a job. In my experience at least, which to be fair is only 6 years
Absolutely correct. Every single place outside of giants like Google take equivalent work experience instead of a degree. I dont even have an AA but I have 16 years experience and 11 certifications and make low 6 figures.
I like you. You have the right mindset. The main motivator for working IT support is helping people. The tech usually takes a back seat to soft skills.
On top of that, you’ll figure out that, as long as you know the fundamentals of how things work, all the details are something you can google. Figure out the fundamentals and you’ll be able to work on anything. Convincing prospective employers of this skillset is a bit more difficult.
I wish you luck and I hope I have the pleasure of working with you some day.
I’ve been dealing with hardware and software issues since my first computer years ago. Like many of us it was either do, or take the PC out back and mourn its passing. I do lack the certifications, even if the knowledge is there. It seems I have some work in front of me.
I do appreciate the words of encouragement. Barring the rare toxic frequent ticketer, most people who have issues just don’t jive with tech well and are yet forced to use it, oh and the stubborn ones. That majority who need legitimate help are the ones I like most and even more I enjoy the challenge of finding ways to explain things to them in a way that clicks. Maybe save a support ticket in the future.
My experiences with IT across multiple organizations is that they’re understaffed and not hiring particularly competent people.
The competent people they do have are generally egomaniacs because they’re the only person or persons in a department full of idiots, and they deal with idiots all day, so they assume everyone is an idiot.
Additionally, IT is SUPER territorial. Like, noticeably so. They have 1-2 people that know what they’re doing, but their whole staff acts like they’re as smart as their smartest person, which they are, unassailably, not. I give a lot of respect to the competent and knowledgeable ones, because I realize they’re also managing a bunch of idiots that don’t know they’re idiots.
Across three different organizations, I’ve watched five members of IT fired for their arrogance. If you’re interested in doing this, simply hire an attorney, bring the smart person into the room with the arrogant idiot, and make it clear that someone in that room is not going to work for the organization in two weeks, and then explain the situation.
If you feel attacked by this, you’re one of the idiot IT staff. I’m good friends with our current CIO and security lead. I hate to break it to you, but they don’t like you either. You are described as “cannon fodder for grandpa.”
Easy to fire, easy to hire. This cartoon adequately captures the level of questions that incompetent people working in IT can feel superior about. But they’re not serious IT issues within a large organization.
That’s why you hire kids that graduated with “computer degrees.” So they can make cartoons and catch all the bullshit, while the real professionals do the real work.
Yeah a place I worked for had managers that thought that way. Then something broke and since the guy who knew how to fix it was fired a long time ago… well… I was already long gone by then. But their system was down for nearly a week.
Now if the managers established any kind of process then personality conflicts wouldn’t be an issue, everything would be documented in advance (ie. planning) and the IT would just be following an agreed upon plan. Both management and the staff know everything that’s happening and why it’s happening. And if there’s staff turnover it’s no biggie because everything is documented and the management knows where the documentation is.
But that requires work… by management. So in many places it doesn’t happen.
The reason why you have arrogant IT staff is only because they know that you don’t know how anything works and they do. They know that if you fire them you’ll be fucking over yourself because if something breaks there’s a good chance you won’t know how to fix it and it may take their replacement a long time to figure it out because you never gave the IT staff an adequate amount of time to document anything.
Sure when you fire these guys things won’t break immediately. It might be a year, even several years before that critical thing (that you never required to be documented, no time for that) breaks and the system is down for an extended period of time.
The IT guys are arrogant because their boss is too stupid to know how to manage things properly to know how things are set up. Some managers are too stupid to even know why their IT guys are arrogant. They’re arrogant because they know that by firing them, the manager is fucking himself over. They’re just underestimating how stupid their manager is.
If you feel attacked by this, you’re one of the idiot IT managers.
Across three different organizations, I’ve watched five members of IT fired for their arrogance. If you’re interested in doing this, simply hire an attorney, bring the smart person into the room with the arrogant idiot, and make it clear that someone in that room is not going to work for the organization in two weeks, and then explain the situation.
I don’t understand this. What happens when you do that?
Agreed. I recognize it is the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and The Woz generation. But the technology is so far beyond what they created, even though we use what the Boomer generation created every day, and I get that.
It’s the Jobs, Gates, and Woz generation, but until they step out of the way we won’t get a new generation of pioneers in technology. It used to be the dream was to create the next big thing, now the dream is to make something that gets you bought up by Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
As somebody who did IT support - the last two seem perfectly normal to me:
Computer “forgot passwords” - obviosly the man is using different browser than regular and it ain’t filling in his passwords. Maybee diferent profile in the same browser? Is he using the same account as usual?
Wind blowing away wi-fi. She is likely connected to the internet through a point-2-point wifi connection and there may be a tree or something along the way messing not wifi signal in her house but her connectivity to the outside. I’d refer her to her ISP, just instruct her to formulate the question a bit better.
The password one is also when they’re on the wrong site and now they’ve just typed all their passwords and account names into microsoftoffice365.scammer.ru
I worked at a software developer, occasionally doing support. Had a call from a customer following up on a ticket, I looked at the record and the salty dude who took the original call had written:
Caller asked me to tell him where he saved his file. I told him “well if you can tell me where I parked my car this morning, I might be able to help you.”
Quality wasn’t a big thing with our software, the senior developer was a stoner who was off his head most of the time, others were either clueless or too busy on side hustles to give a fuck. Amazingly we developed engineering software that was used by amongst others, the atomic weapons establishment in the UK and Buckingham Palace. Happy days.
The mouse is moving. It’s potentially the mouse-pointer that is not moving.
Seriously.
On a side note, love you IT guys 💖 and it seems that if you ask nicely if they have time, they’ll listen and if you try to do your best they’ll be all over it to help you out the best they can.
I had this with a person who said their screen stayed blank no matter what they did. I came down, saw the power light on the monitor was off, saw the plug was not plugged in, and fixed it. She was very embarrassed.
I myself had this problem with my monitor when I first bought it. It has weird touch buttons instead of normal buttons, I plugged it into the computer and kept hitting the power button and it wouldn’t come on. I was getting annoyed that it was broken… Then I realized I only plugged it into the computer and forgot the freakin’ power cable when I was about to pack it back up and take it back to the store. 🤦♂️
This reminds me. At work, I’ve had to help during rapid consultation procedures for surgeons while they are performing a surgery. It involves you cutting tissue microscopically thin with a very sharp blade within this specialized machine.
Well one day I am cutting and cutting and I just can’t get anything to work. It’s making a mess and fucking everything up.
I look down and realize I didn’t even have the blade in the machine lmaooo. I was trying to cut with blunt metal. What a goober move.
I was running hackintosh along side others OSes. Keep in mind it was working fine until it wasn’t. So this hackintosh one day started having a problem. After some time of inactivity, the monitor would sleep. Once it did, it wouldn’t come back up. Only a reboot would help. Eventually I thought it was incompatible with the DVI output since I saw similar hackintosh issues online. I bought a new monitor that would support display port. When I was disconnecting everything I notice that the DVI port wasn’t fully plugged in. 🤦♂️
My Monitor used to turn off randomly for no reason. Until I noticed it turned off every time my mini fridge kicked in, move mini fridge plug to a different wall port and issue resolved.
Make sure you aren’t overloading your wall sockets people!
My cheap electric razor throws a ton of noise onto whatever electrical circuit it’s plugged into
How to sort out ZFS filesystem errors
That the bathroom socket I plug my razor into and the plug across the house that the main desktop is plugged into happen to be on the same electrical circuit
“Why doesn’t Uber specific hardware that the vendor DEMANDED be put on a switch that we don’t have credentials for not work seamlessly with the network?!?”
“Because it doesn’t confirm to the standards of TCP/IP, and requires a dual NIC solution because God forbid they design their system to allow basic routing.”
“You just don’t know what you’re doing!”
“No, I’m just not going to volunteer myself to learn FCoIP so that your one special system has the support it needs until we deprecate it in six months.”
This is why I only work for MSPs that have a closed client list, who pay the MSP for their services. They pay us to be the experts and generally we are treated as such. If a client does end up being unruly or rude, we fire them.
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