posted
Forgive what will be a fairly punch-drunk writing style tonight, but I'm getting to the end of a 20 hour day that began with the complete failure of the student server here at the college.
I've got a ways to go yet - it's nearly 1am local time - and I'm just waiting for a permissions script to finish running.
Anyway. To my point.
Our systems were setup by an eccentric, often offensive, moderately brilliant death-metal loving neo-naturist-fascist. Or something. Suffice to say he's one of the strangest people I've ever met and I like him tremendously. We setup this college infrastructure, 2 XServe G5s an XServe RAID and a few other sundry OSX servers and linux boxes, handling the user accounts for 300 audio, film and 3D students.
I handle the day-to-day management of it, but I'm lost if anything major goes wrong - I am, after all, also the assistant manager, the film course co-ordinator, the main film lecturer, the 3D course co-ordinator and the marketing designer, among other things. I don't really have the time to be the über-tech.
Anyway, our eccentric tech guy was always located in our head office interstate and has since moved overseas to another of our colleges in Vienna.
As a result, when we had the major server outage yesterday, I managed to get it back on its feet, but the netinfo database that reconciled all the student accounts to their home directories on the server was pooched - and beyond me to fix.
So we felt it was time to enter into a service level agreement with a local firm that specialised in high-end Mac installations with a specific focus on RAID systems for pro video use.
We got a tech from that company out here today. He basically arrived - then almost immediately got on the phone to a higher-level tech interstate. And spent the better part of SIX HOURS working on it, with very little success. Probably at least half to 2/3 of that time were on the phone.
Now I could've done that. I could've called a full-on tech person and liased to get it sorted... why are we paying this guy to be inefficient on our time?
And at the end of the day, it wasn't fixed. They're supposed to be back tomorrow.
So I get online and our Vienna guy is on AIM.
He fixes the problem in less than 15 minutes and I'm currently re-importing the users from our admin database.
So finally, I get to the point:
What is it with tech support these days? The best people seem to be the untrained intuitive types who've just gotten in, got their hands dirty and now can intuit their way through anything... the trained people seem to have no intuition, no understanding..... all this knowledge they can't seem to apply in practical situations, no thinking outside the box....
Does anyone else see this?!?!
Posts: 2245 | Registered: Nov 1998
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posted
Because almost anyone who gets to be *good* gets out of the underpaid, underappreciated field of tech support -- heck, is often chased out, because of the increasing emphasis on a predetermined, structured approach (there's a word for it, but I can't recall).
Also, tech workers are increasingly viewed as interchangeable nigh-unskilled labor and are hired by HR based on resumes and nontechnical interviews, when in fact the number of skilled tech workers isn't that big, its just that there's a flood of unskilled ones.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Yes, absolutely, and I empathize with your situation.
We have a customer who outsources their tech work, which I expected to be a worse disaster than it has been. The first tech they got was trained beyond their competence. He was very nice, but I knew we had a real case on our hands when he accidentally unplugged all the servers and didn't say anything until everyone started screaming about how they'd all suddenly locked up. They, of course, thought it was our software that was the problem.
They've since fired him and hired a guy who is much more competent.
I don't think it's so much that training ruins intuition, but that if you don't naturally have the intuition, no amount of training is going to give it to you.
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Your Vienna guy does have the advantage of having set it all up though, which should make it easier for him to figure out what's wrong than the outsourced tech guy. That being said, a lot of times you can get a tech support job without knowing much more about computers than how to turn one on, so it's not surprising that the local firm guy was out of his league.
Pretty much the best techie person I know is my friend Troll, who was totally untrained and just has been opening up computers and messing with them since he was about 10. He's working on a degree from university of phoenix online now though, just because he's tired of managers not listening to him or not promoting him for his lack of formal training. The coursework is, from his description, entirely things he either already knows or will never need to know.
quote:Your Vienna guy does have the advantage of having set it all up though, which should make it easier for him to figure out what's wrong than the outsourced tech guy.
Yeah, but only to a point - this is, after all, OSX server - it's a closed system. If it was a linux server I'd be a heck of a lot more understanding.
But yeah, I think the dominant theme is that intuition needs to be there first..... you gotta wonder what makes people who have no sense for it get into these things...
But then I wonder that quite frequently about some of the poor, inspired, doomed fools who apply for the film course.
Posts: 2245 | Registered: Nov 1998
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quote:he accidentally unplugged all the servers and didn't say anything
Wow, that's pretty bad, jeniwren.
We had our servers in a mini-farm right in our building. We thought it would save all sorts of aggravation. Yeah, only they kept mislabeling our servers (we had 7 there) and would shut the wrong one down about twice a month, kicking all of our students and teachers out of class.
Posts: 3037 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
He was really pretty bad at his job. I tried not to celebrate too loudly when they fired him.
I'm sure there are endless stories of incompetent techs. I think that the tech boom attracted a lot of people who had no core gift for it, seeing a lot of money in it with seemingly very little work. I've been doing this since before the bubble, and so far, except for the very late 90's, it seems like a lot of work (19 hour days? not TOO uncommon, unfortunately) for not nearly the money people used to think (no raises in 5 and a half years....).
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Enigmatic: Your Vienna guy does have the advantage of having set it all up though, which should make it easier for him to figure out what's wrong than the outsourced tech guy. That being said, a lot of times you can get a tech support job without knowing much more about computers than how to turn one on, so it's not surprising that the local firm guy was out of his league.
Pretty much the best techie person I know is my friend Troll, who was totally untrained and just has been opening up computers and messing with them since he was about 10. He's working on a degree from university of phoenix online now though, just because he's tired of managers not listening to him or not promoting him for his lack of formal training. The coursework is, from his description, entirely things he either already knows or will never need to know.
--Enigmatic
My Dad is an instructor for UOPO. Not that this says much one way or the other, just thought it interesting.
Posts: 4753 | Registered: May 2002
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