Answering Some Questions
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This kind of destroys the thread I saw on SW where everyone said you had to start in a Help Desk position to be able to learn anything.
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@johnhooks said:
This kind of destroys the thread I saw on SW where everyone said you had to start in a Help Desk position to be able to learn anything.
LOL. Yup, I've been fighting that misconception my whole career. @AndyW didn't start in helpdesk either and he's a well known consulting IT guy with a long career too (one of the NTG founders.)
I know very few people who hit six figures and started on helpdesk. Most of the people I work with that are in the higher income brackets in IT tended to start off in junior administration, engineering or development roles. You can obviously get there from helpdesk too, but it feels like a very uncommon path to me. Unless you are starting really young.
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What I have found to be more common is that people who go to college to start their careers often then leave college and start in helpdesk, but those that skip college often start in other career areas. College is the most common path into IT from the inside, helpdesk is the most common entry point from the inside. So those two seem to line up as the "following the commonly accepted path" course of action. And it seems that people who feel that college is the only way to get a job and those that feel that all IT starts with helpdesk are very often the same people, so there might be a connection. Or I might just imagine that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
This kind of destroys the thread I saw on SW where everyone said you had to start in a Help Desk position to be able to learn anything.
LOL. Yup, I've been fighting that misconception my whole career. @AndyW didn't start in helpdesk either and he's a well known consulting IT guy with a long career too (one of the NTG founders.)
I know very few people who hit six figures and started on helpdesk. Most of the people I work with that are in the higher income brackets in IT tended to start off in junior administration, engineering or development roles. You can obviously get there from helpdesk too, but it feels like a very uncommon path to me. Unless you are starting really young.
I've never worked in a Help Desk (thankfully) but from what I have seen/heard, it seems like it's almost impossible to get out. And it looks like it rarely challenges people enough to make them want to be there.
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I worked in Helpdesk for 11 years. Now I don't
oh wait yeah I do when someone around here is sick or doesn't "show" up I get to still. -
@scottalanmiller said:
What I have found to be more common is that people who go to college to start their careers often then leave college and start in helpdesk, but those that skip college often start in other career areas. College is the most common path into IT from the inside, helpdesk is the most common entry point from the inside. So those two seem to line up as the "following the commonly accepted path" course of action. And it seems that people who feel that college is the only way to get a job and those that feel that all IT starts with helpdesk are very often the same people, so there might be a connection. Or I might just imagine that.
It's kind of crazy. You get a degree in whatever field it is (CS, CIS, etc) and then start in an entry level position where someone who never went to college could start and do fine.
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@Minion-Queen said:
I worked in Helpdesk for 11 years. Now I don't
oh wait yeah I do when someone around here is sick or doesn't "show" up I get to still.I guess that's probably true of all of us to an extent
Esp at home ha -
@Mike-Ralston is a great example of this (as in happening as we speak). All his buddies are headed off to college in the next week or so. He is starting his full time job in IT. He has interned here for almost 3 years and is handling a good portion of our PBX Engineering, with oversight of course as he is junior but still full time. At a higher pay scale than I would hire someone coming out of college.
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@johnhooks said:
I've never worked in a Help Desk (thankfully) but from what I have seen/heard, it seems like it's almost impossible to get out. And it looks like it rarely challenges people enough to make them want to be there.
People often assume that helpdesk is like a gateway to other IT careers, but it is not. You don't put in two years on helpdesk and magically have skilled or experience to be a DBA or something like that. Helpdesk is its own career inside of IT, it's not a stepping stone to different careers. The idea that you do helpdesk as a means to something else is completely weird and illogical. Companies hiring a path like that are nuts.
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@johnhooks said:
It's kind of crazy. You get a degree in whatever field it is (CS, CIS, etc) and then start in an entry level position where someone who never went to college could start and do fine.
The only thing is that people waste years going to college to learn nothing useful and do so learning from people who often couldn't get the job you wanted anyway. What qualifies them to teach? Often nothing more than being otherwise unemployable, or wanting to take it easy. Sometimes you get lucky and get good professors, but not very often.
If someone goes to college and has the same skill set as someone who didn't go to college I'd take the "didn't go to college" one every time because it shows that they have more ambition, make better decisions and need less handholding to do the same things.
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@Minion-Queen said:
At a higher pay scale than I would hire someone coming out of college.
Three years of experience versus zero experience. Lots of ambition versus took four years to chill out and drink a lot of beer.
Of course he makes more than a recent college grad, he has tons more to show!!
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@scottalanmiller said:
People often assume that helpdesk is like a gateway to other IT careers, but it is not.
But as you just said,
@scottalanmiller said:
helpdesk is the most common entry point from the inside
This is where the perception came from. Simple assumption really. Most people DO start on a helpdesk and then find a new job because they now have the magic "Degree + Experience" thing that get past the HR filters.
You are 100% correct that Helpdesk is not a skill path to an IT career other than Helpdesk.
You are incorrect that helpdesk is not a gateway to other IT careers. It is a gateway because many people use time on a Helpdesk to gain experience time. Yes it is Helpdesk experience and not server or network or PBX, etc. But, it is still valid IT experience.
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@JaredBusch said:
You are incorrect that helpdesk is not a gateway to other IT careers. It is a gateway because many people use time on a Helpdesk to gain experience time. Yes it is Helpdesk experience and not server or network or PBX, etc. But, it is still valid IT experience.
I'm not saying that it is not experience, did not mean to suggest that. I'm a big believer in that helpdesk is completely valid professional experience the same as anything else in IT. In no way do I mean to belittle helpdesk, in fact I think that I respect it far more than most people in the field do.
Working on helpdesk for a decade is a full decade of IT experience, no ifs ands or buts in my mind there. What I mean, though, is that it is experience that only directly leads to higher helpdesk positions (from junior, to mid to senior to lead, etc.) Even a century of helpdesk experience, though, is only experience on the helpdesk, with enough years of helpdesk you don't become a systems admin, a network engineer or a PBX designer.
Now, helpdesk experience + taking time to learn a new skill area might be a great way to move latterally to another IT area. And that, in theory, is how people intend to use it. Put in three years on a helpdesk while teaching yourself a different skill are (MS SQL Server DBA, for example) and prove to the company that you are loyal, responsible, etc. Put those things together and you might be a good candidate for a DBA slot. Although I wonder how often people actually manage to move around in those ways.
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@JaredBusch said:
This is where the perception came from. Simple assumption really. Most people DO start on a helpdesk and then find a new job because they now have the magic "Degree + Experience" thing that get past the HR filters.
Nearly everyone that I see doing that, though, appears to still be working in helpdesk
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@scottalanmiller said:
Nearly everyone that I see doing that, though, appears to still be working in helpdesk
Only because Helpdesk is the largest sector of the IT career fields. SO of course most would still be in Helpdesk.
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@JaredBusch said:
Only because Helpdesk is the largest sector of the IT career fields. SO of course most would still be in Helpdesk.
Maybe, but that the majority of people claiming that helpdesk gets you into other areas of IT are only ones who do not appear to have done so.
Is helpdesk really the largest? It probably is, but it's always a small segment anywhere that I've seen. Is there any stats on that somewhere? I've heard it stated a lot but have no idea if that is just what we all think or if there is something solid behind it.
Defining helpdesk is a little tough too. Are server admins helpdesk? In some ways, because they aren't the engineers and their field the helpdesk functions but normally to developers rather than desktop users.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Is helpdesk really the largest? It probably is, but it's always a small segment anywhere that I've seen. Is there any stats on that somewhere? I've heard it stated a lot but have no idea if that is just what we all think or if there is something solid behind it.
Is it really? Probably not. Probably the largest is the one man IT Dept.
Helpdesk though is in the 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands. For example, AT&T alone has thousands of Helpdesk workers in the US. I was one of them once upon a time. Note, this was not how I got started in IT, but it was something I did to move out of one field and into another. Using the time I was doing that to pickup other skills.
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@JaredBusch said:
Helpdesk though is in the 10's of thousands if not 100's of thousands. For example, AT&T alone has thousands of Helpdesk workers in the US. I was one of them once upon a time. Note, this was not how I got started in IT, but it was something I did to move out of one field and into another. Using the time I was doing that to pickup other skills.
That's a lot of helpdesk. Although at Citi we had in the thousands of system admins. When you get that big, all the departments start to get really large
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@scottalanmiller said:
That's a lot of helpdesk. Although at Citi we had in the thousands of system admins. When you get that big, all the departments start to get really large
The office I worked in had ~500 supporting DSL. It was still SBC at the time. PacBell had 2 helpdesk centers and Ameritech had 1 or two. All with similar staffing levels. Then they merged in with BellSouth. By that time a couple of the other centers had shifted, but still in the thousands, just for that one job duty.
All US based. This is not counting the outsourced Tier 1 stuff.
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I'm a hybrid maybe????
Started college, hated it. Got a job interning with NASA (no helpdesk) IT Security(title only). Moved to a 2 man in house medical facility with 800 or so users. did helpdesk, server admin, form printing, ms office help, etc. we did everything, then jumped into SMB consulting with a big MSP, and decided I wanted to be self employed......here we are now. so yeah, no help desk, little bit of college. and I'm happy with my pay
