How come my users never understand the simple things..
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I'm picking up what you're putting down man.
On the up side, if everyone knew all our cool stuff, what use would we be?
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The guys that get to improve everything else, like server performance, or our virtualization platforms etc.
I shouldn't have to tell a user how to connect to the VPN every time.
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And the kicker, I connect and the user has 10% power, can't find her charger, or the installation media for her new wireless printer.
Which she wants me to setup for her
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While I'm at it I'll just wirelessly charge your laptop battery.... and change the oil on your car.
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@MattSpeller said:
I'm picking up what you're putting down man.
On the up side, if everyone knew all our cool stuff, what use would we be?
More use as we could do actually valuable stuff instead of doing the equivalent of sharpening peoples' pencils for them in the late 1800s.
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@scottalanmiller ah but then there would be fewer of us in junior positions to feed in talent over the years
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Not really as the talent is simply going to have to learn more meaningful skills. Rather than how to troubleshoot some kids wireless issues IE Is the wireless switch turned off?
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller ah but then there would be fewer of us in junior positions to feed in talent over the years
I don't know that that is true. I believe that it is mostly, but not completely, a myth that pointless time wasting doing end user hand holding somehow breeds design, engineering and other skills. It is used to show effort, ambition, dedication, etc. But all the non-hand holding skills have to be learned and cultivated externally anyway.
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I see some value in having to learn soft skills. Granted it's not earth shatteringly important to have them or anything. I think it does make for a more valuable employee later on though. That's not to mention developing patience, understanding and the early years of refining one's ... bovine turd detector.
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@MattSpeller said:
I see some value in having to learn soft skills.
You can't learn soft skills, IMHO. Either you have them or you don't. And if you can learn them, you could learn them anywhere. Working in a hotel or restaurant or in other parts of IT. All IT needs soft skills, so making positions whose only purpose is to teach them is completely wasteful. You'd still learn them in whatever starting positions people had.
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Soft skills are absolutely something that will be learned from personal experience. It shouldn't be required that an adult, who pays taxes, cooks food, drives, has kdis etc needs to have their hand held for simple tasks like connecting power.
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@MattSpeller said:
That's not to mention developing patience, understanding and the early years of refining one's ... bovine turd detector.
I see this as bad. Should IT or anyone on the business side of the house become callous to the worthlessness of staff? Patience for people not being willing or able to do their jobs is probably not a good thing to develop.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Soft skills are absolutely something that will be learned from personal experience. It shouldn't be required that an adult, who pays taxes, cooks food, drives, has kdis etc needs to have their hand held for simple tasks like connecting power.
One could argue that IT should not provide soft skills to cover up a lack of hard skills in other staff
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@MattSpeller said:
That's not to mention developing patience....
I like to refer to this as "lowering the bar of acceptability."
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@scottalanmiller True, but by not having and applying said soft skills it becomes "Well I asked IT and they refused to help"
Which doesn't get anything done, because management expects IT to help whenever applicable.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller True, but by not having and applying said soft skills it becomes "Well I asked IT and they refused to help"
Managing that is a different skill set entirely. You simply need to document that you helped but refused to cover up them not doing their job. Document aggressively - show a ticket from before they complained that shows them trying to get IT to do their jobs for them, trying to get IT to hide from management ineptitude.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Which doesn't get anything done, because management expects IT to help whenever applicable.
No, healthy good companies don't work that way. It makes zero business sense. You would just have IT do all the work if that were the case.
Working for unhealthy small businesses that arent doing well provides a skewed view into the enterprise expectations of IT departments.
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The I must start looking for other places because everything I've ever been at wants / seems to want IT to do everything (or just about everything possible) so that the user / salesperson / accountant etc etc can "do their jobs"
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@DustinB3403 said:
The I must start looking for other places because everything I've ever been at wants / seems to want IT to do everything (or just about everything possible) so that the user / salesperson / accountant etc etc can "do their jobs"
You are only looking in the SMB, I assume? SMB consists of two types of companies: those that are only temporarily SMBs as they are on their way to being big companies; and those that are never going to make it big. The former are rare both because the average SMB crashes and burns and because they disappear by the nature of becoming big. The later is more common simply because on average SMBs fail and of those that remain most fail to grow and just limp along forever. So the vast majority of SMB jobs is working for companies where management is failing to take the company to what most people consider success. So the nature of work in the SMB is focused around the concept of failed or failing management.
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The upside is that users like this truly do generate a lot of jobs, one way or another.
